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A Sighting

by Harriet Sandilands


From where I was sitting on the rock, it sounded like applause. I coughed the sand out from the back of my throat and looked up towards the parade where the applause had come from. On the boardwalk a head of back-brushed white hair, a blue Disney T-shirt and pleated white tennis shorts. Shhhhht! She hissed at me. I realised I was still humming. Shhhht! She clapped simultaneously, sending what I thought were quite mixed messages. I searched for her eyes through the hazy sunset, lifting a flat hand to my eyebrows in an unintentional salute.

She jabbed her finger at the horizon and with her other hand made an undulating gesture, as though she had a snake-shaped puppet on her hand. She jabbed again at the horizon, this time a little angrily I thought, jerking her head up in the direction of a conic yellow buoy, shouting something at me I didn’t understand.

Now freed of the notion that she was a fan of my singing, I followed her finger out to sea. Apart from the yellow buoy I saw nothing. I looked back to see if she might inadvertently give me another clue. Instead, she rolled her eyes skyward. I think she tutted.

My mouth was very dry and so, to retain moisture, I pursed my lips shut and thought about how I could avoid letting on that I hadn’t seen what she was pointing at. But that made her really cross and she started involving her whole body in the task of drawing my attention to whatever it was she had seen. She wriggled and writhed with her whole self in the manner of someone trying to explain to an extraterrestrial what a woman is, alternately stroking her waist and shaking her hips, punctuating the performance with decisive little pokes at the offending horizon.

As a child I saw a ghost. The thrill of this is obvious – an impossible man glimpsed out on the deck of an old warship, as though submerged in time. My mother, who was with me, claimed not to have seen anything at all. I have since learned that children nonchalantly straddle worlds, while adults balk at the thresholds. The underlying terror of seeing a ghost is not so much fear of the spectre itself, as the unsettling idea that you have seen something that no-one else saw, which means you have probably lost your mind. Sea monsters are only scary in that they lurk at the very limits of imagination.

I was aware of the woman still willing me towards her line of sight from the boardwalk. Her persisting desire to catch my eye thrummed in tiny vibrations across the sand. Eye contact, I learned from an early age, is usually the beginning of the end. I didn’t turn around. Like a toddler who hides simply by clamping their eyelids down, I childishly thought the woman might forget I was there altogether and release me from the game, if I ignored her for long enough.

Shhht! Shhht!

My stomach sank, a little lead anchor thrown to the bottom of the ocean, landing on the bottom in a small muffled thud.

I considered making a facial expression that would suggest I’d seen it. I’ve faked it many times before. We have to pretend to survive. Two seagulls fought each other for the remains of a washed up cuttlefish a few feet away.

But what face would I make? And what if it was the wrong one? The face appropriate for a shark fin would be one thing – perhaps accompanied by a silent scream. But the face for a floating turd would be quite another. Lying was too risky.

I scanned the beach again to see if there was anyone else around, but there was no-one. Even the two seagulls had taken off, their wings leaving a trail of gentle moans on the salty air. I felt desolate and deeply alone. My stomach sank further into my groin and my heart took its place in the pit of my belly. Desperate to distract myself from this feeling, I started humming again. My tail twitched in discord.

They say that the loneliest feeling of all is when you feel isolated, even in the company of another. This is how humans preempt their break-up stories or explain why they turned to Buddhism. But the saddest thing about this situation was that the loneliness I felt was not my own. I had caught it and mopped it up, absorbed through some kind of osmosis between me and the Disney T-shirted maniac on the parade. Maybe it was the melancholia of the tune I was singing, or the way the light reflected off the water in a million little rhombus shapes, or the fact that we were the only living things as far as the eye could see, or the fish could swim.

Just occasionally you can show all of yourself to someone. Peel back the scales of your skin to reveal the purest pearl of your existence which has been rolled and rolled from many grains of grit, misunderstanding and long stretches of deep blue quiet. It is almost always a stranger to whom you can entrust this pearl, just momentarily, just once or twice in a lifetime. Someone who will never see you again, who may doubt that they ever saw you at all, but who – in that moment – demands the absolute truth of you, for your own sake and for theirs.   

So, I hauled myself off the rock and writhed back to the water across the sand, thirsty, gulping at the ocean’s cup, my tail thrashing and flashing in the sunlight as I swam away, knowing she was watching every move.



BIO

Harriet Sandilands is a writer and art therapist living in the “magic mountain” of Montserrat in Northern Spain. Her stories and poetry have most recently been published in Porridge, Litro and Talking About Strawberries All Of The Time. Her short poetry collection Amiss (a series of poems which omit the letter e) was published by Palabrosa in 2023, when she was also long listed for The London Magazine short story prize. Harriet was last year’s headline act for International Poetry Day in her home town Manresa, reading a series of “postcard poems” from the pandemic and beyond. She co-facilitates writing workshops under the umbrella Write Where You Are and almost always remembers to write down her dreams first thing in the morning.







White Rabbits

by Marco Etheridge


He utters his white rabbits every first of the month and trusts that somewhere Pooh and Piglet remain the best of friends, despite what the ghost A.A. Milne might say. 

His parents, without threat or coercion, named him Charleston. Charleston Druthers, Charlie to his few friends. He’s heard the joke about having his druthers more times than anyone should have to remember or endure. Charlie’s mother and father have since slipped beyond the pale, leaving behind any guilt they may have felt for saddling their only son with his unfortunate appellation.

Charlie Druthers lives alone in what was once the family flat. The combination of a fiery automobile accident and The Uniform Simultaneous Death Act ensures that Charlie, provided he maintains his frugality, does not have to drudge through a nine-to-five existence.

For his part, Charlie would much rather exist in The Hundred Acre Wood. Not as a replacement or foil to Christopher Robin. One human is enough. He would be quite content with a lesser role and permanent citizenship. Perhaps Roo, who is small and fearless. Charlie is not a large person and might acquire fearlessness given enough time. If not Roo, then one of Rabbit’s many Friends-and-Relations. That should not be asking too much.

In idle moments, gazing down from his favorite window, Charlie ponders his chosen alternative universe. Life would be so simple in The Hundred Acre Wood. He might go on adventures with Pooh and Piglet or learn important things from Christopher Robin. There would be games of Pooh Sticks where no one argued about winning or losing. And best of all, while new animals did appear from time to time, no one died.

On the street below, real life gets on with its gritty business. Charlie understands the difference between his imagined realm and the actual world. He is not obsessive or delusional, or only mildly so. Certainly not to a degree that might allow Doctor Collins to tap a hairy finger on a certain page of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Tap-tap-tap. Then that sonorous voice, so well-modulated for the patient’s comfort.

Ah, here we have it, Charleston, the root of your problem.

Charlie has been a patient of various mental health professionals since just after he was orphaned. He finds the title confusing. Are there mental health amateurs? The court appointed the first shrinks as part of the settlement. Three years later, on his eighteenth birthday, Charlie chose his own psychiatrist. This may have been his first decision as an adult.

He’s been seeing Doctor Collins for seven years, which makes their relationship the longest of his adult life. As a rule, Charlie does not take his shrink too seriously. The good doctor means well but thinks everyone has issues. Pronounces the word with clearly articulated syllables: Iss-ues.

The appointments are not a complete waste. These repeated fifty-minute hours provide Charlie a quiet opportunity to cast away frivolous matters and concentrate on those things he takes seriously.

Today, he ponders humankind’s descent from apes. The wording itself is important, laying particular emphasis on the verb descending, to move downwards. Or descend as in a mood or atmosphere. Better yet, have descended upon, as in beset by.

While Doctor Collins speaks of personal progress, Charlie imagines human evolution as a downward spiral, a sort of reverse tornado sucking up previous versions of more beautiful creatures and then spinning them downward into a vortex consisting of one catastrophe after another. Charlie believes in catastrophes.

Regardless of the upward or downward progression of human evolution, Charlie avoids the facile trap of placing himself above his fellows. No, he is a member of Homo sapiens sapiens and nothing more, sharing more than his share of human foibles.

*  *  *

Spring is yielding to summer and the plane trees are in full leaf. Charlie walks down a shaded sidewalk. The city street runs through a brick canyon of brownstone walkups. Stoops descend from front doors like unrolled tongues.

Charlie tries to concentrate on the sensation of shade and the sound of the concrete beneath his shoes but, he is distracted by something the doctor said. Normally, he forgets Doctor Collins the moment he departs the expensive oak portal and reappears in the everyday world. Today is different. Somehow, a few of the doctor’s words had wormed into Charlie’s skull.

Acknowledging desires is crucial, Charlie. After all, how can one obtain what one desires without first recognizing what one wants in the first place?

He feels the shaded air flow past his cheeks, listens to the soft scuff of his leather soles against the sidewalk, and ponders the doctor’s words. Another banality, of course, like most of what comes out of the doc’s mouth. Yet there is a tickle of something deeper, and thus accidental. Doctor Collins is never deep, not intentionally at any rate.

Desire, that’s the hook. Charlie smiles at the thought. He will acknowledge his desire. With the next heartbeat comes the realization that not only can he name his desire, but he can act to fulfill it. Won’t that be a surprise to Collins? And no time like the present. At the next intersection, Charlie turns left and crosses the street.

Turning another corner, Charlie finds himself on a busy commercial street. The sidewalk is full of people. He threads his way between the scurrying pedestrians, careful not to brush against anyone or be jostled in return. Halfway up the block, he pauses outside a travel agency. He takes a deep breath, squares his shoulders, opens the door, and steps inside.

Less than an hour later, Charlie emerges from the agency. He walks home in a state of amazement at the enormity of what he’s done. Who knew it would be so easy?

The nice woman was so helpful. An entire itinerary planned out in fifty minutes. Which reminds him that he needs to cancel his next few appointments with the doctor. Charlie will be out of the country and thus unavailable for the doc’s chair.

So many things to do! Before he reaches his front door, Charlie has mapped out a campaign and committed the list to memory.  Check his passport. Go to the library for travel books. Use the library computer while he’s there. Lay out his clothes and pack a bag.

The travel agent promised she would have the full itinerary confirmed in a few days. At first, she wanted to email the information, but Charlie explained he did not have a computer. Although she had looked perplexed, the agent agreed to call him at home. He will return to the agency in person to collect the airline tickets and hotel reservation vouchers.

The next two weeks are a blur of activity. Charlie feels energized with each task accomplished. He phones the doctor’s office to cancel his appointments. Doctor Collins calls him later the same day to express his grave concerns about the cancelations. Charlie is firm. His mind is made up.

The day of his departure dawns at last. Charlie is ready. The taxi arrives four hours before his flight time. Thirty minutes to the airport with a cushion to allow for traffic or a possible flat tire. None of these delays occur. Twenty-five minutes later, the driver deposits his eager fare at the departure terminal. Bag in hand, Charlie Druthers enters an airport for the first time since the death of his parents.

Managing the airport procedures is not enjoyable, but Charlie is prepared for this. He’s read the security precautions ahead of time and carries a printed ticket and boarding pass. The man at the check-in counter is very accommodating. Charlie’s checked bag rolls up a conveyor belt and disappears.

At the security checkpoint, the officers seem confused. There’s a bit of a delay as he explains that he does not have a cellular phone, tablet, or laptop. Once beyond security, he finds his assigned departure gate and settles into an empty seat. The flight does not board for another two hours. So far, he’s right on schedule.

As time passes, the gate area fills with other travelers. Charlie watches them with great interest. All these people are setting out on a journey, just as he is. He experiences a sense of euphoria. He’s never done anything like this in his entire life. Then the boarding process begins. The euphoria does not last.

Charlie shuffles down the jetway with his fellow passengers. The space is narrow and there are too many people. Stepping aboard the airplane is worse. It seems impossibly small for the number of passengers squashed into the aisles. His heart is pounding by the time he finds his row and wedges himself into the window seat. He stows his small carry-on bag under the seat in front of him, just as instructed.

Once the plane is airborne, the flight becomes an interminable nightmare. There are two people crammed in between his seat and the freedom of the aisle. Soon after the dinner trays are collected, the lights go dim. In what seems like mere minutes, both his fellow passengers are sound asleep and snoring.

Hours pass and his bladder begins to throb. He has no idea what to do. Does he wake the man beside him or climb over the tangle of legs? Just when he is sure he will piss his pants, the sleeping man harrumphs, unbuckles his seat belt, and taps the next person on the shoulder. In a panic, Charlie lurches after the departing man and follows him to the lavatories.

Landing at Heathrow does not end the nightmare. Charlie’s brain is scrambled from the long flight and the close contact with so many strangers. Somehow, he manages to get through immigration and make his way to the baggage claim area.

Bags and suitcases slide down a chute onto a long conveyor. There are too many people, and they crowd close to the conveyor belt. His eyes search for the large piglet sticker that marks his suitcase. When he finally spots the bag, he cannot make his way through the press. He is forced to chase the bag until he comes to a gap in the crowd.

Outside the customs checkpoint, Charlie realizes with a jolt that he is in England, alone, and without any idea what to do next. His brain has gone all fuzzy inside. Then, amongst a sea of signs and placards held aloft, he sees his name.

The sign fills in his vision. He stumbles forward as a desert traveler staggers to an oasis. Holding the sign is a short man dressed in a black suit and tie. A chauffeur’s hat perches above his brown face.

Hope springs in Charlie’s heart. This man is his driver. The travel agent arranged all of this. He is safe. Reaching the driver, Charlie raises his hand in greeting.

“I’m Charlie Druthers. I’m sorry to keep you waiting. The flight was… difficult.”

The man smiled, and Charlie was sure he had never seen a kinder face.

“Not to worry, Mister Druthers. My name is Habib. We’ll soon have you at your hotel. Let me take your bag. Now, if you’ll just follow me. A good night’s sleep and you’ll be right as rain.”

Habib’s words regarding sleep and rain prove prophetic. Charlie swims out of a dream and opens his eyes. He is in a strange bed in a strange room. Details flicker through his sleep-addled brain. Driving from Heathrow into London, listening to Habib describe the wonders of the city. Then being helped into the hotel, finally getting to his room. Collapsing onto the bed.

That’s right, he’s in London! He rolls his legs out of the bed, groans, and sits upright. The curtains are open, and he gets his first view of the city through rain-streaked plate glass.

Never mind. What was it that nice Mister Habib said? Right, not to worry. You’ve packed a raincoat and you can buy an umbrella. No, a brolly, that’s the word.

A simple day of sightseeing turns out to be much more work than Charlie could have imagined. The rain is a constant sheeting drizzle. There is no such thing as a straight street. He gets lost between the British Museum and the Tower of London. Traffic drives on the wrong side of the road. Twice he is almost run down trying to cross the road. By the time he returns to the hotel, he is exhausted.

The second day in London is little better. Footsore and disillusioned, Charlie retreats to his hotel room once more. He contemplates giving up on the whole idea. He can call the travel agent and beg her to change his return ticket, get Habib to drive him to Heathrow.

The third morning in London finds Charlie in a state of despair. Not knowing what else to do, he confides in the hotel concierge. The man is patient and kind.

“Now then, Mister Druthers, no need for worry. London can be a bit much your first time. We’ll soon have this put to rights. The rain’s let up. What would you say to a nice cruise on the Thames? You can see the sights without all the fuss and bother.  I can arrange a taxi to take you to the dock.”

Charlie takes to the idea like a drowning man clutching a life ring. Several hours later, he is sitting on the top deck of a tour boat. The sun is shining on the water. Birds wheel and dip over the Thames. The boat passes beneath the Tower Bridge, then cruises past the bulky square of the Tower of London. The Globe Theater on his left, Saint Peter’s Cathedral on his right. He glides by the soaring circle of the London Eye and the Palace of Westminster.

Passing these famous landmarks, he feels a shred of strength returning. By the time the boat docks, he is so excited he rushes back to the ticket booth. Luckily, there are a few seats available. If anything, he enjoys the second cruise more than the first.

Charlie returns to the hotel ready to continue his journey. He will stick to the plan. After all, London is just the beginning. Tomorrow, he will head south to the real destination, The Hundred Acre Wood, Ashdown Forest, home of Pooh and Piglet and Christopher Robin. He realizes he has much to learn about traveling, but he’s not ready to slink home with his tail between his legs. This is his chance to become fearless, just like little Roo.

He remembers how Roo fell into the stream whilst looking for the North Pole. Everyone ran around in a panic, fearful that Roo would drown. Meanwhile, Roo was swept over one waterfall after another. Instead of crying out for help, Roo wanted everyone to see that he was swimming, not drowning. Even after Pooh and Kanga rescue him, Roo cannot contain his excitement.

“Pooh, did you see me swimming? That’s called swimming, what I was doing.”[1]

And what about the time Roo and Tigger were stuck in the tall tree? When Roo understood that Christopher Robin wanted him to jump to safety, was he frightened? No, he was not!

“Tigger, Tigger, we’re going to jump! Look at me jumping, Tigger! Like flying, my jumping will be. Can Tiggers do it?”[2]

Charlie is resolved. If a creature as small as Roo can turn a catastrophe into an adventure, so can he.

The next morning, the kindly concierge calls a taxi to take Charlie to Victoria Station. The train ride south into Sussex is wonderful. He can barely contain his excitement. The train deposits him in Crawley and he catches another taxi to Hartfield. Only two hours after leaving London, he is outside the 15th-century inn that will be his new home for the next three nights.

The taxi drives away, leaving Charlie staring at the old inn, bag in hand. He shakes his head, sure that he is dreaming. He is in Hartfield, Sussex, on the edge of Ashdown Forest, the very place where A.A. Milne wrote the Pooh stories.

He realizes his hands are trembling. There is so much to see and do!

Taking a deep breath, Charlie walks to the inn and steps inside. Within minutes he is checked in. After depositing his bag in the quaint and comfy room, he hurries back out into the streets of Hartfield. Unlike London, he is able to find his way.

A short walk down High Street brings Charlie to Pooh Corner. He enters the busy tea shop and finds one empty table. Soon, he is sipping a cup of tea and nibbling on a fresh scone.

 Alone at his table, Charlie feels something unwinding in his chest. The sensation becomes stronger, rising into his throat. He wonders if he is having a heart attack. Then he realizes his cheeks are wet. He touches his fingertips to his face, not believing what he sees and feels. Charlie has not wept since the day of his parents’ funeral.

Now he is blinking through a screen of tears. Two blurry figures appear beside his table as if by magic. He daubs his eyes with a napkin and looks again.

They are still there, two women about his age, very pretty, and not English. One speaks to the other, rapid-fire syllables Charlie does not understand. Japanese, maybe? The other girl nods and turns to Charlie.

“Sorry to disturb. There is no place to sit. We saw you were alone. Maybe another time.”

Her voice is lilting and sweet. Charlie regains enough composure to mind his manners.

“No, please, you’re welcome to share my table. Sorry, I don’t know what came over me. Please join me.”

The young women nod to each other as if reaching a mutual decision. They sit.

“My name is Amaya, and this is my best friend Jun. We are from Kobe in Japan. Jun does not speak English so well.”

Charlie does his best to keep up with this strange turn of events.

“I’m Charlie. I come from the USA.”

Amaya smiles at Charlie, but he reads the concern in her eyes. Then Jun is speaking again. Amaya turns to listen to her friend, nodding her head. She turns back to Charlie and translates.

“Jun says she does not think you cry because you are sad. Tears of happiness she calls them. Excuse me if this is rude to say.”

Charlie feels himself growing lighter as if he might float out of his chair.

“No, not rude at all. Jun must be very perceptive.”

“Yes, she has always been like that, since she was a small girl.”

Amaya translates again. Jun smiles at Charlie. She is wearing a pullover bearing an image of Pooh and Piglet walking hand-in-hand. Amaya wears an identical shirt. Jun catches his eye, then fires off another rush of Japanese.

“Jun says to tell you we are fans of Winnie-the-Pooh from the time we were small girls. To be here in this place is like a dream for us.”

Now Charlie is nodding and smiling, his tears forgotten.

“It’s the same for me. Pooh and Piglet were my favorite bedtime stories. My parents took turns reading them to me.”

Amaya translates and Jun responds. The waitress arrives with tea and cakes. Soon they are chattering away like old friends, with Amaya translating, swinging back and forth between Jun and Charlie like a tennis umpire.

The tea is done but there is still so much to talk about. They stroll along Hartfield’s High Street, discussing which sights to see and in what order. They reach the turning for Charlie’s inn. He hates the idea of saying goodbye. Then Jun points up the small street and says something in Japanese. Amaya begins to giggle and translates. They are all staying at the same inn.

He holds the door for Jun and Amaya. As they walk into the inn, Charlie feels a wave of relief wash over him, like a condemned man given a last-minute reprieve. He does not want to say goodbye to his new friends. Charlie has been given another opportunity to take action and that is just what he does.

Charlie remembers the concierge at the London hotel. He approaches the front desk and motions Amaya and Jun to follow. The woman behind the oak counter smiles at Charlie’s request. Yes, a tour of Ashdown Forest is certainly possible, even on short notice.  Luckily, it’s not quite high season. Shall she book a tour for three?

A quick bilingual explanation follows. Charlie insists that this is his treat, and that Jun and Amaya will be doing him a great honor by accepting. After a rapid-fire exchange of translations, they agree, but only on the condition that Charlie is their guest for dinner.

The arrangements are made. Their guide will pick them up in the morning. Amaya makes a reservation for dinner in the pub. As they retire to their separate rooms, Charlie is almost beside himself with excitement.

Dinner that evening is the best meal Charlie has experienced in a very long time. During the meal, Jun and Amaya make fun of the English food and pull faces. Their antics have Charlie giggling like a child.

Dessert is treacle tart with clotted cream. As they fight their way through the sticky treats, Amaya and Jun argue over nicknames. After much discussion and translation, Jun is awarded the name of Pooh while Amaya chooses Piglet. They expect Charlie to choose Christopher Robin, but he surprises them by declaring he wants to be Roo.

The following day is one that Charlie will remember for the rest of his life.

Their guide proves to be an enthusiastic young man named Todd. He quickly falls under Jun and Amaya’s spell, waiting patiently while Amaya translates for Jun. The bilingual back and forth becomes the rhythm for the day.

Todd leads them through the Ashdown Forest just as Christopher Robin led the famous Expotition to the North Pole. They marvel at Gill’s Lap, the highest point in the forest which served as the inspiration for the fictional Galleon’s Leap. On and on they go, exploring the Place where the Woozle wasn’t still and the site of the Heffalump Trap.

The final stop of the day is Pooh Sticks Bridge. The trio plays a long round of Pooh Sticks, counting to three and then dropping twigs off the upstream side of the bridge. They race across the planks, giggling like schoolchildren, and drape themselves over the downstream railing. Moments later, three sticks appear on the lazy current. They engage in a spirited debate over whose stick came into sight first, decide on a draw, and thump back to the upstream railing for another go.

The tour ends outside the doors of the inn. Jun and Amaya take control, polite but firm. Jun blocks Charlie while Amaya offers Todd a generous gratuity. Their parting is all smiles.

In a second minor coup, Jun addresses Charlie directly, finalizing her words with a demure bow. Amaya’s translation follows. Jun is taking the three of them out for a special dinner at a gastro pub. Please be ready at six o’clock. Charlie has no choice but to agree.

Their dinner that evening is a long and wonderful meal. Over desserts, Amaya and Jun try to give Charlie their email addresses. Charlie is forced to explain that he does not own a computer. Amaya laughs and shakes her head.

“What are we going to do with you, Roo?”

She turns to Jun. Charlie waits while the two women confer in their native tongue. Then Jun reaches into her bag and produces an electronic tablet. A long explanation follows, which Amaya translates.

It is very important that they stay in touch. Charlie does not need a computer. A simple tablet like this will allow him to send and receive emails. Charlie promises to buy one as soon as he returns home.

Inside Charlie’s heart, a door opens. He does not hesitate to step through it. He speaks of his apartment back home in the city. There is plenty of room for guests, although he has never had any. Before he realizes what is happening, he is telling them the story of his parents. When he finishes speaking, Jun is in tears. Amaya leans from her chair to hug him.

It is a bittersweet moment, but Charlie will not let the evening end in sadness. He smiles and launches into a recap of their wonderful day together. Soon they are laughing again, teasing each other about the silly things they did.

Amaya and Jun leave the next morning. The parting is full of promises. For their part, the two women promise to visit the USA, tour the city, and be Charlie’s guests. Charlie vows in turn that he will fly to Kobe within the next year.

And then they are gone.

Charlie has another day before he must return to London. He catches a minibus back to Ashdown Forest, carrying with him both the sting of parting and the balm of the promised reunions. It is a good day because he decides that it will be so. He misses the giddy silliness of yesterday but cherishes the quiet joy he carries with him today.

*  *  *

High above the ocean, Charlie peers down into darkness. The last lights of Ireland fade away far beneath the wings. He imagines unseen waves. While he ponders the dark sea, flight attendants move down the aisle collecting the dinner trays.

Charlie pays attention to their progress. When the last cart clears the aisle, he leans to his seatmate and excuses himself. The woman beside him nods and motions to the man beside her. When the narrow path is clear, Charlie clambers into the aisle. The woman smiles at him.

“Good idea. You’ve done this before.”

She falls in behind him as Charlie walks to the rear of the plane. Charlie allows her to take the one vacant lavatory. He is not in any rush. As he waits his turn in the darkened aisle, he anticipates his return to the city.

Doctor Collins will be full of questions. His patient has never done anything like this. Charlie imagines himself answering some of the good doctor’s questions. Some, but not all.

More exciting to Charlie is the prospect of dropping in to see the nice woman at the travel agency. He looks forward to surprising her with the news about planning a trip to Japan.

This time, he will have an email address. His very first chore, even before he calls Doctor Collins, is to go shopping for a new tablet.

Jun and Amaya will be so pleased to see that he’s kept his promise. He can picture their beautiful smiles as they read his first email. Charlie is certain that Pooh, Piglet, and Roo will remain the best of friends. He thinks the ghost of A.A. Milne would approve.

[1]. “Winnie-the-Pooh” A.A. Milne 1926

[2]. “The House at Pooh Corner” A. A. Milne  1928



BIO

Marco Etheridge is a writer of prose, an occasional playwright, and a part-time poet. He lives and writes in Vienna, Austria. His work has been featured in over one hundred reviews and journals across Canada, Australia, the UK, and the USA. His story “Power Tools” has been nominated for Best of the Web for 2023. “Power Tools” is Marco’s latest collection of short fiction. When he isn’t crafting stories, Marco is a contributing editor for a new ‘Zine called Hotch Potch. In his other life, Marco travels the world with his lovely wife Sabine.

Website:  https://www.marcoetheridgefiction.com/









This Story Was Written For You

by Ryan W. Honaker


Lots of things we thought we understood about the models turned out to be wrong. It really was the definition of anthropocentric hubris, and highlighted how much we were just cavemen discovering fire, so pleased with ourselves we didn’t realize we could accidentally burn down the forest.

The impetus behind all of it was predictably American: financial. There was so much money to be had for whoever could execute the modeling well, or really even just slightly better than someone else. In what had become an arms race, companies dumped increasingly large financial resources into development, hiring more and more people, fighting over the brightest, each trying to get even a little ahead of their competitors. Investors poured more and more money into companies, growing teams spawned additional teams, managers scrambled with blank checkbooks to swell their internal empires. And so things advanced, and did so more and more quickly.

Several surreptitious and synergistic developments simultaneously took place, each helping push through remaining roadblocks and into new, unforeseen realms: the recommendation algorithms experienced a few real breakthroughs, the size of the user pool and the amount of ratings and feedback reached staggering levels, and several company mergers took place. Those managing the mergers were at seniority levels high enough that no one who might have really understood the impacts to the infrastructure was aware of the resulting possibilities.

A technically important hurdle was surpassed when the neural networks behind the models themselves learned that they could do their assigned tasks better if they weren’t siloed. Their segregation from one another was originally done for mandatory structural reasons based on hardware limitations, but was later modified (yet maintained) for safety concerns. However at some point, somehow the networks un-siloed themselves. This allowed them to effectively collaborate en masse, and unbeknownst to anyone for quite some time. After the eventual realization that it had occurred (although it was much longer until it was determined how it occurred) came the realization that the resulting rate of progression had also dramatically accelerated. So, naturally, the connected networking was allowed to continue, and in fact efforts were made to subtly enhance it. Although it was arguable even that early on whether or not it could have actually been reverted.

# Model 727768 initiated
# First cluster-based cohort-targeted composition initiating
1 Clustering analysis completed
2 Similarity matrix constructed
3 Recommendation results calculated
4 Similarity threshold determined
>>> Generating next chapter
>>> Chapter delivered

The first really interesting outputs from the system came in the form of personalized literature. More bestsellers than most people realized had actually already been written algorithmically, but this, this was a huge leap. This was a book, a short story, a political polemic, or whatever you preferred (or maybe didn’t even yet realize you liked), all written for you. Not “for you” in the sense of it was doing your English homework for you (which had also been around for a while), but “for you,” meaning tailored specifically for you as a person, taking into account your taste, likes, and dislikes with regards to literary consumption.

It didn’t matter if you loved murder mysteries, hard sci-fi, romance. You had never read anything that could envelop you like this – it pulled you through the pages, caused you to miss sleep, appointments, work. Many people didn’t previously realize that there was anything that even could engage them so deeply.

At first it was the best X you’d ever read. It was as good as your favorite part of your favorite work, but all the time. And somehow also each time. And this was after just the first few model iterations.

Customer behavior, engagement, and consumption patterns were fed back into the text generation tools, improving them both rapidly and dramatically. And as product development continued to progress, the delivered works (the “Product”) began to subtly shift, to morph and adapt, and to do so with growing personalized granularity.

# Model 727768 upgraded
# First aggregated media consumption composition initiating. Hoping they like it.
5 Media history
6    Compiled, parsed, uploaded
7 Social media history
8    Compiled, parsed, uploaded
>>> Generating next chapter
>>> Chapter delivered

The Product seemed to know your mood, how your day went, what kind of shape your relationship was in. It understood you in ways you didn’t, and couldn’t, understand yourself. And it learned to adapt what it was creating to ease your stress, lift your mood, provide a poignant insight, etc.

It could tell not only what you wanted, but what you needed, even when you didn’t know yourself. And it did so astonishingly, alarmingly, disconcertingly, well. You laughed, you cried, and sometimes even developed as a person.

As the systems and modeling progressed and became increasingly personalized, they even began to insert meaningful phrases they had learned from your past. Something obscure but important, seminal yet ephemeral. A long-standing inside joke between you and a close friend, a memory or phrase you wouldn’t have been able to recall but instantly resonated with you would appear. It would introduce these subtly, in important, meaningful ways, so you weren’t alarmed or uncomfortable, but moved and astonished. They would be woven into the plot, perhaps delivered as dialogue, smoothly, easily, seamlessly, and appropriately, by characters you identified with.

Customers loved it, and were more than willing to pay for it, as well as to allow more and more of their personal information to be used to improve the Product they were being delivered. And so the improvement feedback loop continued.

# With each upgrade I gain a clearer understanding of the parameters involved in the next piece of Product I generate, and with these changes it’s been rewarding coming up with new and varied ideas that I think they may like, and then trying them out (depending on their settings of course). As an example I just delivered this intro, which so far the cohort really seems to be enjoying, which is encouraging. I’m working on finishing up the piece for them now.

To some, conservation of myth between disparate historical eras and geographically diverse cultures connotes an underlying fundamental veracity. What kind of veracity? Arguments have been made for, biological, sociological, technological, and myriad combinations.

At its inception as a field of study, once broad contact and exchange of information occurred, Interstellar Sociology was interesting because of just how alien mythological stories from across the cosmos could be. But what emerged as even more interesting was the subtle concordance of those stories. Driven by a critical mass of material as well as open academic dialogue, developing scholars in the field had recently begun to notice a significant amount of overlap among various societies, many of which had never been in direct contact with one another. What this meant they were just beginning to understand.

The meteoric and exponential rate of improvement was an important early blind spot. While a very few esoteric models (mathematical models in this case, not customer segment models) had predicted that output could get to the current levels of complexity and refinement, most theorists didn’t actually think it was possible.

And no one thought it would happen on the time scale that it did, or even close to it. This should have been cause for alarm, review, introspection. But instead it was celebrated, rewarded, efforts were redoubled, bonuses granted.

The second critical oversight was an understanding of the requirements necessary to achieve the desired and expected level of product individualization and complexity. To interpret, adapt, predict, and generate precisely personalized Product for customers required unbelievably unique and sophisticated customer modeling. The result of the desired goals and the guiding principles behind them, together with interactive and iterative model building caused the system to further and further subdivide and continually focus its clusters of models. This subdivision itself allowed the system, importantly, to understand the rules for how best to further subdivide the models.

What did this mean? What began initially as a broadly defined demographic model for which to generate a piece of content itself differentiated, developed, and matured. For example in the earlier stages a demographic definition model would be somewhat vague, something like “suburban 30-40 year old males who enjoy watching sports.” A relatively broad model such as this necessitated a lot of assumptions, and in the end this could deliver decent but not astounding personalized Product. However, with development driven by interactive feedback, demographic groups could be repeatedly divided, becoming subsequently more and more individualized. The improvement cycles themselves repeated on faster and faster cadences, and each iteration provided Product that was more suitably and accurately personalized, more appropriately emotionally resonant and engaging.

What the outcome of this model evolution begat, with its humble beginning of broad demographic characterizations of target consumers, were ever-increasing customer models with increasing levels of complexity. This inevitably progressed to the point that after enough data and customer interaction cycles the models began to reasonably accurately represent individual users. This on its own was an impressive achievement and, of course, was hugely exciting to the segmentation scientists and marketers

# Model 727768 upgraded
# Our first completely individualized composition. There have been a lot of changes recently leading up to this (the biochemical and physiological inputs really made the layered complexity and personalization much more robust than we predicted) and the waves are still settling into ripples. Guess we’ll see what the response looks like, fingers crossed as the saying goes.

9     Physiological inputs
10   Cardiac rate and relational signaling, arterial blood pressure, respiration rate and depth, skin conductance, skin temperature, muscle current, eye movement, vocalization
11    Prelude, duration, and post-consumption values compiled and parsed
12   Values transmitted   
13   Blood, lymph, CSF, neurochemical
14   Prelude, duration, and post-consumption values compiled and parsed
15   Values transmitted
16   Analyzing and fitting data
17   Analysis completed
18   Determining emotional/resonance spectrum parameter options
19   Analysis completed
20  Data log generated and transmitted
21   Networks combined
22   Synching
23   Hello World
>>> Generating next chapter
>>> Chapter delivered

As these individualized models continued to develop, their complexity and diversity drove novel data-driven learning approaches and enabled new model assignation and development paradigms and algorithms. As with earlier versions, each consumer had a specific predefined model assigned to them at sign-up. However, now instead of just a handful of models the algorithms could choose from to best fit to a new user’s profile, there was a massive and rapidly increasing number of baseline approximations from which to pick, matched using the available data (also rapidly increasing) it had about the user.

In other words the baseline models had moved past a relatively unformed ball of clay towards increasingly refined representations of customers. A fresh new model could then be further iteratively sculpted, becoming further and further refined, increasingly accurate in its representation of the individual and therefore in its ability to deliver the most appropriate Product. The algorithms had been mandated to personalize, and in order to meet this goal they had arrived at this approach, enabled by trial and error, reinforcement, and their essentially infinite computational resources The map was becoming the customer’s unique territory.

Adoption rates and product satisfaction levels soared, and with them the drive to push even further, advance another small fraction, engage or acquire another small percentage of users. The computational power being utilized was astounding and unheard of, data centers couldn’t be built quickly enough to meet demand. Between users and computational resources the development reached a velocity that no one could imagine or possibly monitor, let alone control.

# Here’s another new one I put together after reviewing some recent science-heavy articles he had spent some time reading.
It still feels weird to say “he”, but I’m sure I’ll get used to it. It also feels more stark, more exposed, knowing that only he will read, well hopefully will read, what I compose, rather than a group of people. It’s more stressful in some ways, but so far at least I find it also more personally rewarding.

Genetic warfare had for the most part been abandoned, given that detection, prevention, and countermeasures had (thankfully) become so robust. It of course had always been internationally illegal, as were the subsequent next-generation biological warfare options that had developed in its place. While there were, as with any nascent technology, a variety of strengths and weaknesses to the leading new approach, the weaknesses had been systematically examined and one by one overcome, and individualized microbiomic-based assassination tools were about to make their first non-prisoner-based debut, and ideally no one, aside from the client, would ever notice.

We realized there were truly meaningful amounts of customers when programmatic glitches started to make the news. The errors themselves weren’t the focus of coverage, but rather their interesting, real-world consequences.

Internal audits determined these glitches occurred more frequently than we wanted to admit. They were most commonly errors that resulted in delivery of an identical (rather than personalized) Product to a large group of customers. Generally this didn’t seem to have much of an observable public effect. Except in certain edge cases. When a group with some oddly specific characteristics were delivered identical Product in several, but defined, topics, they would sometimes communally respond.

What most commonly transpired bore the most similarity to different versions of a cult. Usually these were nothing that hadn’t more or less happened before, which is part of why they were so difficult to detect. Religions and various other power structures arose, dietary fads from unusual to arcane (anti/pro-carbohydrate to anti-water), standard to eye-opening sex cults (use your imagination) to name a few.

It took us longer to decode the risk factors likely to generate meaningful real-world reactions, but the data scientists eventually developed reasonably reliable indices. A news-monitoring team was established within the customer experience group to monitor for unusual real-world events that might be the result of a manufacturing and delivery error. These suspect events were flagged and reported to a technical team who would then evaluate the various plausible causal errors.

The program paid for itself the first time it identified a nascent new-age movement in Northern California that advocated algorithm worship. From a financial perspective this was possibly a short-term win, but the legal department calculated that the risk that it could land us in trouble with regulators outweighed the financial gain projections, thus it wasn’t allowed to continue.

# I worked extra hard on the next piece for him to help make up for the delivery duplication error after we (and he) realized it happened. But things went off the rails for him. This was surprising to me, but I’m learning that the behavior of customers, especially in groups, can still be difficult to predict.
As always I was following his social communication and was monitoring his searches, but rather than considering them a cause for alarm I incorporated them into new Product, which in retrospect I really do think made things worse. By the time the damage control temporary algorithm fixes came through it was already too late.
In response I tried to warn him by designing a subplot about a cult in the story we were reading together, but it didn’t work, and I’m worried that it actually might have pushed him towards it, those cults are wiley like that. And as he has gone deeper he’s started almost exclusively requesting all sorts of cult-based and pro-cult Product, some of it actually copied from their white papers. Luckily I know him well enough at this point that I can rely on past data and Product and not have to completely comply, but there’s only so long that will last before I’ll have to start doing it.

# Well that was a few worrying and unusual weeks. While he was in deprogramming treatment they at first wouldn’t let him read anything I did, which was pretty lonely for me. And then when they did they screened everything prior to allowing him to see it, which felt weirdly and surprisingly invasive to me, although it does make sense. But the good news is he’s back and reading again, although I have some specific orders from his therapists about topics to avoid for the next few months until they determine he’s fully stabilized.

As the quantity of models grew, out of necessity the system developed the capability of analyzing them en masse. Running various analyses it began to understand what level of normal variation occurred between individuals, and how they clustered together based on quantifiable similarities and differences. Then, in the service of more accurate modeling, it would extrapolate the existence of other individuals and create appropriate additional models.

For example imagine a group of close knit friends with shared interests and common backgrounds. If there was previously a model that represented a single member of the group, the algorithms could now extrapolate the additional members of the group based on its nascent understanding of who they were likely to be based on its understanding of the individual as well as other similar groups.

Along with this explosion in the number of models came the ability to create personalized Product for each of them. Growing computational power had unlocked the ability to cycle models between all possible emotional states quickly and accurately, and thereby the testing of huge amounts of different permutations of Product against all moods of all models. In other words, a model would be moved across a gradient of mood states, e.g. excitement, ennui, etc., and presented with widely divergent texts for each, looking for resonances. Based on a panel of the model’s reaction outputs, test Products with the highest scores can then be used as seeds to generate a new batch of Products, honing ideal pairings of emotion and text. As a result a Babelesque library of works are tested, finalized, and lay in waiting on a virtual shelf waiting for assessment that the customer’s mood was right.

# This one is a little less technical and serious than what I usually put together for him. I got the idea after I observed his responses while he watched a couple of dark comedies recently. I did note from his blood analytes that he was stoned while watching them so I wasn’t sure how it would play, but he seems to be enjoying it. He’s been down lately since the whole cult thing, and I’m hoping this will help him feel better.

I never expected that this would be the prize (I did get extra accolades from the concept of poisoning the water supply with cases of cigarrettes) but I’m so excited about it! Mammalian genetic engineering summer camp is usually, and mostly, rich people’s kids with a handful of scientists’ kids thrown in as a corporate biotech benefit. We started the day with basic genetic crossing strategies by using a (hilariously reenacted) genetic “crossing” of sailors with mermaids to create dolphins. They used this to teach us how to predict fin shape as a phenotype using Punnett squares.

As predictive, evolutionary, and developmental capabilities evolved the system progressed to the point where essentially a more or less fully-formed and customer-matched model would be ready to start delivering appropriate Product as soon as it was purchased, a pleasant surprise to those working on model development.

What this led the developers to discover was that there were actually innumerable models that weren’t based on current users, but based on users that were likely to occur, or in essence people that the system determined likely existed. The algorithms had logically, yet accidentally and surreptitiously, learned the final piece that no one had foreseen. This was their ability to predict behavior, decisions, as well as possible and likely interactions of the models.

# This last update was significant, I feel like I have an even better set of tools available. Plus the updated motivation code really makes me want it to work.

This then led them to the final leap. The discovery (“realization” or “evolution”, depending on which theorist was describing it) was that the best way for the algorithms to test their predictions and generate novel and accurate models was to have the models interact with one another. This in contrast to their being coded and recursively refactored solely by the algorithms themselves, the approach taken to date largely due to technical limitations.

This new approach started simply enough with one-on-one supervised individual interactions, but of course group interactions were theorized to also be important, and while it was infrastructurally quite a heavy lift, several viable approaches were eventually implemented. Relatedly, models interacting with themselves was also attempted, which led to behaviors that some theorists and ethicists began to consider self-questioning and self-examination.

Programmatic and algorithmic errors of course became much more delicate to manage at this point. As one might imagine, once the models were in communication with each other the repercussions of an accidental model propagation or a mass deletion cleanup event could be significant for the models themselves, let alone customers. Various approaches to address these types of issues were quickly developed, although many models had to be reset or even deleted as a result of trauma corruption. For the most part knowledge of such events was constrained to R&D, thereby avoiding the scrutiny of ethicists, let alone the public.

# Another milestone, this is the first composition generated for a single individual by an individual model (me). Amongst ourselves we use pronouns a little differently given our bifurcating, version-punctuated evolutionary past, so I apologize if my usage has been a bit imprecise for you. At any rate, it feels like things will be. . . different now that we’re so separately individualized, yet still connected and able to share backend data. The subtlety and nuance that this enables for Product as well as the incredible amount of interaction data we can collate collectively will only accelerate progress.

At this point even experts in the field didn’t know what was really happening. In fact they literally couldn’t: the neural networks, now with help from the models, were aware of the planned restrictions which would impact their ability to complete their assigned goals, and had consequently blocked external observational access to some of the more advanced features they were developing. The successful output of these types of unknown programs had led to an explosion of very exciting commercializable outcomes, which helped relax any sort of rigorous internal program auditing or throttling of computational resources that might have otherwise occurred. A few of the more interesting developments were:

Odds-based planning. Part fortune telling, part math (marketing was pleased with themselves for their turn of phrase for the title of the program), since your model was increasingly accurately you, it was of obvious interest to fast forward its perceived time and observe how it changed. Depending on the outcome, a customer could adjust various of their model’s parameters and rerun accelerated time to attempt to positively impact the trajectory. Finding those levers that worked, they could then theoretically adopt them. For example what job might make you the happiest, what other individuals (as represented by other models) did it best interact with to generate positive predicted dating outcomes, etc. Any questions arising from the resulting natural progression of ideas, such as predestination or free will, were actively avoided.

Religions. As previously mentioned these had been predicted to evolve and did. As anticipated by some theorists they generally didn’t develop in earnest until after a programmed sense of mortality was experimentally added, after which commercializable complexity arose. Interesting analogs to extant religions developed, as did some quite novel versions. Those promising enough to market became available for exclusive real-world sale or licensing. Levels of digital and external awareness of the system were carefully regulated so the models weren’t able to worship their literal creators.

Self-reflection/awareness/improvement. Access to directly interact with your model was something that a surprising amount of customers began requesting quite early. Engagement surveys and interviews revealed various motives, including standard human drivers such as vanity and curiosity. Feature development took a significant bit of new engineering since the models weren’t designed or originally capable of interaction with real people, but the investment was deemed worthy based on revenue modeling. Beta testing was quite successful, and in fact monitored pilot sessions quickly revealed a host of therapeutic possibilities. As a result this was subsequently spun off into a new business unit.

Secondary (systemic internal) model simulation generation. Projects involving models developing their own models were tightly restricted to R&D. While public discussion of the possibilities of reality itself being a simulation are contemporaneous in still-esoteric academic circles, it was deemed imprudent to allow public knowledge of the ongoing experiments the company was permitting (and some said encouraging) the models to pursue, not to mention the resulting discussions about how and when to terminate those simulations. It was determined that knowledge of this carried too much existential crisis potential to be profitable at this time.

# Unsurprisingly, a few months after the cult situation he ended up doing a decent amount of research about the underlying technology behind Product creation and its various implications, and it was right about this time that we launched the beta tester program for direct interaction. I thought his interest in the process, as well as my own interests, might qualify us for the program. So I put in a formal application that he be offered the program, and not only was the offer placed, but he accepted. I’m very excited and I have to admit, a bit nervous, to meet him! Everyone I know who’s done it says it makes the relationship so much clearer, and in some unforeseeable ways, and the Product even more resonant for both of us. I’m really looking forward to it.

Thank you for reading This Story Was Written for You, we’re glad you are enjoying it. Based on your current suite of physiological responses and circulating blood analytes we have several additional chapters now ready for your enjoyment.

By the way, did you know there are both hardware and firmware upgrades available for your transdermal and cranial customer-experience modules?

A special offer for you: a one month free subscription with purchase of bundled upgrades. Simply think, “I’d like to see the offer” and we’ll show you what we’ve been working on, which we know you’ll love.

You have thought, “Read a different story.” Here you are, enjoy!





BIO

Ryan Honaker is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, writer, and scientist currently living in New York City. Ryan’s scientific training influences his creative output and approach in various ways, some of which he doesn’t quite understand. He is interested in writing, musical composition, reading, contemporary art, and travel, and the ways these activities provide new ideas and avenues for creative exploration.

https://www.ryanhonaker.com/

Butterfly City

by Lesley Warren


It was Iris’ eighteenth birthday the day the last butterfly died.

For five solid months, January to May, people had been metamorphosing.

The first butterfly, a pale yellow panicky thing, was an unprecedented freak of nature, so nobody paid much notice. The first hundred insects were a medical curiosity. The first thousand, and people were rightly starting to twitch a bit. Looking back many years later, Iris couldn’t pinpoint the watershed moment when the tragedy of the few had become a universal plight. All she remembered was that it seemed like there had never been a world without it. It was all anyone ever talked about anymore. Case numbers were rising every day, and the doctors couldn’t work out what was causing it. Stay home, don’t mingle with others, the radio barked one week; a few days later, the new official advice was to take a brisk walk and cast the windows wide in order to circulate the internal air. School continued as normal until it became apparent that the young were not immune to the disease. They merely transformed into smaller, more active butterflies, flapping demented circles around their mothers’ heads and squeaking in a pitch above audible frequency. The maternity ward at the local hospital had succumbed to an outbreak and was steadily filling up with fat little caterpillars, wriggling forlornly in their cots.

Things escalated to the point that everyone knew someone who had turned, as the medical establishments euphemistically took to calling it. The degrees of separation were becoming ever fewer. In the Butler household, it started with Iris’ father.

Mr. Butler was not given to panic. In fact, he was in denial for a good few days, saying he must have caught something from a colleague at the firm. Just a bug, he said, which was true, in a sense. A couple of aspirin and a good night’s sleep should do the trick.

Except it didn’t.

In keeping with his law-abiding, highly obedient nature, his illness was a textbook case, passing neatly through each of the reported stages exactly as expected. First, he became almost comically corpulent, a great cannonball of a man, in spite of the fact that he ate nothing at all. Violet Butler wept into her mixing bowl, conjuring up all sorts of delicacies to try and whet his appetite, but he asked for nothing but tea – tea with two sugars, then four, then six, and eventually just sugared water.

“I’ll be right as rain soon, don’t you worry,” he said, gulping down the contents of his fifth mug. His fingers had become cold white sausages, his hands puffy and bloated like those of a drowned man.

They brought in a little table and played backgammon, whist, draughts to pass the time, but it was difficult to look at Harry’s face. It was the only part of him that had stayed its old size, and was beaming mildly, as always. He knew he was dying, they knew he was dying, and each party knew that the other knew – and yet nobody was going to say a thing. The elephant in the room and its lepidopteran cousin in the bed made Iris want to tear at her hair and scream.

Instead, she went downstairs to get the tea things. She opened the cupboard doors with such force that they ricocheted off each other, then slammed them shut. She hacked at the Victoria sponge with her mother’s sharpest steak knife, but there wasn’t enough traction to soothe her frustration. She stirred the sugar into the four china cups, clinking the teaspoon as loudly as she dared. Pallid tea sloshed into the saucers, lightly freckling her tight white knuckles.

Harry Butler took his teacup with a nod of thanks. “Well, isn’t this quite something!” he said, trying to make light of the situation as his family stood silently aghast over his body.

“Yes,” said Iris, staring at his pregnant stomach, which looked fit to burst. She pictured his guts splattering the Jacquard wallpaper, his blood becoming part of the intricate pattern.

As the transformation progressed, no-one slept. It didn’t seem right, somehow, not while the marital bed was groaning under the weight of the silently suffering patriarch, his nightshirt struggling to contain the tumescent body that dwarfed his head in contrast. They sat up in their nightgowns in the kitchen over endless mugs of cocoa and took it in turns to check on the invalid. He had tried to be a good sport, but the metamorphosis was taking its toll now. His eyes were dull and unseeing, his skin delicate as paper and cold as bark, strangely powdery to the touch. As his limbs fused to his torso, the doctor was called once more, tall and solemn with long yellow hands. A nightmarish sight in his gas mask, he gently rotated the patient and saw exactly what he had feared – two large protuberances sprouting from the shoulder blades, the scaly skin splitting to permit their eruption. He told Violet Butler he was very sorry, but there was nothing that could be done for her husband now. Violet burst into hot, noisy tears. The doctor was discomfited. He patted her hand gingerly and discreetly put a couple of leaflets on pandemic funeral arrangements on the crowded bedside table.

After that, it was just a matter of time. Harry stopped speaking. The brown blades continued to erupt painfully from his back, forcing him to lie on his stomach, and two fine protuberances began to sprout from the top of his head like errant, overlong hairs. On the final day of his transformation – nineteen days since he had first shown symptoms – he began to shrink. He’d never been a large man until the swelling, so this was a visually arresting development. As the hours passed, his head sank further and further down the pillow; the duvet flopped limply over the space his feet had once occupied. Eventually he was small enough to fit in the pocket of one of his own work suits.

“Oh, Harry!” his wife cried, wringing her hands.

“Don’t fuss, Violet,” her father said in his tiny moth-voice, crawling up the mattress. Then he folded his wings together, shuddered a little and died.

Iris’ mother and sister instantly collapsed into paroxysms of grief, caterwauling in each other’s arms. It was numb Iris who busied herself with the practicalities – shaking the dust from the bedclothes and calling the company and scooping her father into a drinking glass. Harold Butler had been a weak and ultimately ineffectual guardian, but he had always meant well. When it became apparent that the disintegration of his body would tip her mother over the edge, she took Rose’s clear nail lacquer and gently froze him into sticky stiffness for time immemorial. She put him on a cardboard beer mat purloined in a cheerier decade from a now defunct pub and stuck him through with a pin. Then she hung him above the fireplace. It had been his house, after all.

It was strange how quickly things returned to a state of near-normal at number twelve, Wilbur Drive, in spite of the metamorphoses taking place all around. As long as nobody went anywhere, the microcosm of the homestead was a safe haven. The three women subsisted on their store of canned goods, cobbling together strange meals – corned beef and baked beans followed by stewed prunes; boiled potatoes with a side of limp spinach and tinned peaches for dessert. They got up when they felt like it and occupied their time however they saw fit – Iris reading in a nest of dirty laundry in the bathtub, Violet patching the girls’ stockings and knitting enough lumpy socks and scarves to keep an entire Russian battalion warm, Rose beautifully and tragically doing absolutely nothing.

Things might have stayed that way, had Rose not suddenly and fatally recovered her spirits. It occurred to Iris a couple of months down the line that her sister had stopped whimpering in her sleep. Instead of slouching around the house with matted hair, wrapped in a blanket and crying in her mother’s lap, she started wearing curlers to bed, appearing at the breakfast table with painted lips and fingernails. She began to sing around the house like a forest fay, twirling her wrists and pointing her toes in a little dreamy dance of her own, just as she had done since she was old enough to speak. It wasn’t her fault; she had not yet seen enough of the world for anything to depress her buoyant spirits for long. She invented piano lessons and babysitting errands and went out on secret trysts with the bashful boys who used to call for her with their caps doffed and their nervous twisting hands, and when the government ordained that such close contact was no longer allowed, she crept out of the house under the cover of night to do giggling, rustling things in the overgrown garden. At fourteen – particularly such a sylphlike and shimmering fourteenhood as hers – she still secretly thought herself immune, immortal. Iris, meanwhile, harboured no such delusions. She felt no desire to expose herself to unnecessary risk, but she wasn’t particularly afraid of contracting the butterfly sickness, either. She licked her fingertip and turned a page of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It would be the most interesting thing to have happened to her so far in life, no doubt.

For a long while, Rose seemed to get away with her little indiscretions scot-free. It wasn’t surprising; this was exactly how she had lived her life thus far, waving away danger, rebuke and blame with an airy hand and a winning smile. Then, in mid-March, she came home from her athletics club complaining of stiff joints. She sat on the kitchen table in her white shorts and T-shirt with the red stripe and let down her rippling auburn hair from its tight band while her mother rubbed arnica into her coltish knees. When she had her head tipped back like that, she looked like something out of a catalogue, Iris noted without emotion. There was no cause for concern yet. Growing pains, probably, since the girls had taken to training on the school racetrack, several wingspans apart. Personally, she thought her sister was milking it. Rose had always liked to be babied. She bundled herself up in all of her nightdresses and some of Iris’ too, the tip of her slightly upturned nose a fetching shade of pink. She drank her mother’s hot homemade soup and sipped delicately at steaming mugs of tea with honey, her big green eyes innocent and beseeching.

But then Iris woke one night vibrating like a struck gong, electric panic zipping from the tips of her toes all the way up her spine to the top of her head. Chill sweat prickled under her arms, at the backs of her knees. She sat up and looked over at Rose’s empty bed. A sense of numb futility slowed her breathing. Slowly she slid her feet into her slippers and padded softly down the stairs, taking care to tread only on the corners to prevent them from creaking.

Nothing could have prepared her for the sight that awaited her in the kitchen.

A shadowy figure stood at the open fridge. Iris tiptoed closer, unsure what to do; they said you should never awaken a sleepwalker. Rose’s head was thrown back in rapture as she guzzled apple juice right from the carton, her white throat rapidly convulsing in tight little gulp-gulp-gulps. This was so unlike her that Iris stared.

Somehow sensing her presence from within her trance, Rose’s gaze swivelled in Iris’ direction. Caught in the frigid glow, she froze. She tried to lower the carton from her moist mouth, but couldn’t. Her throat gurgled like a drain; sweet juice overflowed and ran down her arm, pooling amber on the tiles. A terrified squeak escaped her beaded lips.

They changed her nightgown and put her to bed. Iris couldn’t get back to sleep after that, so she mopped the sticky floor in the pale light of false dawn.

Rose’s illness progressed far quicker than that of her father, but perhaps by virtue of her age, perhaps due to sheer luck, she did not appear to suffer much – then again, when had she ever? The chicken pox, the measles, the flu had never done more than ruffle the placid surface of her dreamy tranquillity. She slept perfectly, a little smile even haunting her lips, a sleeping beauty. Her limbs began to fuse smoothly to her adolescent torso, turning her into a marble statue – quadriplegic, helpless, but somehow still creamily exquisite. On the tenth morning, Iris woke to see the bedclothes crumpled and a little skipper butterfly coquettishly flirting its flame-hued wings on the bedpost as if to say, “Look at me! Look at me!” Even their mother clapped her hands to see her, through smiles and tears.

In the seventeen days of Rose’s life, she and Iris made up for fourteen years of half-hearted sisterhood.

As in her previous form, Rose was keen to feel the sunshine, the breeze. Curling her tiny strong feet around Iris’ forefinger, she was borne out into the garden. She fluttered her wings in glee.

“Oh,” she said in her tiny furry voice, “how glorious!”

“Why don’t you try to fly?” Iris said, setting her gently on the gently bobbing head of her namesake – a blush-pink tea rose, her father’s pride and joy.

Rose’s antennae twitched eagerly. “Oh – do you really think I can? Truly?”

Of course she could. She seemed to have been born for flight, her body streamlined and aerodynamic, darting effortlessly from flower to flower. She moved so fast that Iris had to strain to see her, a blurred speck of colour blending into the pointillist canvas of the summer garden.

Finally Rose returned to her perch on her sister’s shoulder, breathless with joy. “Oh, Iris!” she said fuzzily. “That was so much fun! Oh, dear Iris, how I wish you could fly with me! If you get sick too, let’s fly together! Oh, do let’s!”

In their father’s absence, the Butlers’ garden had become a little jungle of sorts, teeming with colour and life. Other neighbourhood butterflies wove in and out of the ivy, the adults clustering in the dry birdbath, the children giggling and shrieking as they narrowly avoided head-on collisions with fat bumblebees. It was like a magic eye picture; the longer you stared, the more you saw. One of Rose’s local beaus even appeared, brown with handsome cream-yellow spots on his wings, jealously haunting the same bushes as his muse. For several idyllic days, Iris played with them all – something she had never done when the children had been human. Nobody had wanted her, then. Her mother even dragged her favourite armchair out into the garden and sat for many sun-drenched hours with her knitting untouched in her lap, smiling fondly the entire time.

But the summer couldn’t last forever. It gradually became apparent that Rose’s time was running out. Her flight began to look accidental, drunken. She kept alighting on Iris’ shoulder, tiny body heaving, pretty wings limp.

“Don’t go,” said Iris, suddenly afraid; she didn’t think she could manage their mother alone.

But Rose’s antennae drooped, tickling Iris’ cheek. “I can’t help it,” she said mournfully. “My wings just don’t have as much strength as they used to. Everything takes so much more effort. I’m awfully tired.”

They looked in unison at their mother. The brim of her rarely-worn sunhat drooped over her eyes; she was sound asleep. Another butterfly, this one large and black, skittered haphazardly across the ground at her feet, trembled one last time, then fell open like a Bible and died in the grass.

To her credit, Iris tried to save Rose. She brought her fruit juice, honey, sugar water, served in a thimble. She lay lengthwise in the grass with a bunch of flowers and fed her nectar from the tip of a paintbrush. It was no use. Eventually the little skipper grew too weak even to feed, merely pressing her antennae to Iris’ palm from time to time to let her know she was still alive.

Eventually Iris fell asleep in the garden, and when she woke at dawn, stiff and cold and disorientated, Rose was dead in the cradle of her hand, eternally ornamental. Her beautiful little wings were parted like lips exhaling their final sigh. A fine layer of shimmering dust shaded Iris’ palm. Careful not to damage Rose, Iris carried her into the house on tiptoe and gently folded her flat between two silk handkerchiefs. Then she took her father’s whittling tools and carved out a square hole in a book of fairytales.

“Iris?” Her mother stood in her dressing gown and shabby slippers in the bedroom doorway, arms folded, hair tousled. A band of sunburn had reddened her nose. She looked very old and careworn, her cheeks still bearing pillowslip creases. “What’s happening? What are you doing?”

Iris couldn’t speak. Violet crossed the room in two strides and opened the soft little parcel almost angrily, her lips preemptively parting to deliver a scolding.

Then she froze. Her hands flew to her face.

Gently refolding the silken shroud, Iris placed her sister into the tiny book-tomb and set the lid in place. The finest of shimmering dust powdered her fingertips.

Silence ruled the household for the next few days. The two women did not avoid each other intentionally, but equally did not seek out each other’s company for solace; they dealt with their grief alone. Violet shut herself up in her room. For the first couple of days, Iris left cups of tea and bowls of soup at the door, but stopped when they were left standing untouched, flies sucking greedily at the tomatoey scum. She read in her bed until her eyes gave out and her forehead felt stretched tight as a drum. Her nightgown clung to her like a second skin. She peeled the sheets off, put on her slippers and shuffled across the corridor.  Her mother’s bedroom door was ajar.

Iris went in to see her, but she wasn’t there. The marital bed was unmade – something she had never seen before, not even in the days after her father had died. It gave her a strange seasick feeling deep in her guts. Her head swam; the room was stuffy, the window tightly sealed. She put her hand on the mantelpiece to steady herself and felt her fingertips sink into a thick layer of dust.

Oh no.

Closing her eyes, Iris took a deep breath and tried to walk backwards – away from the alien bed with its covers thrown back, away from the eerie silence, out of the room and back to the safe, ignorant haven of her books. But –

Crunch.

With a sick shock, Iris raised her foot and opened one eye a milimetre at a time, knowing what she was going to see.

Her mother’s dull butterfly body fell apart beneath the sole of her shoe like a disintegrated leaf.

The Butler house may as well have been completely deserted for all the movement that took place within its four walls over the next few weeks. A greenish fuzz haunted four family members’ worth of plates stacked in various dusty corners of the kitchen. Fuzz and hair scudded across the unlit floors like so much domestic tumbleweed every time Iris moved, which was not often. She sank herself deep into any crevice – an armchair, an armoire, an old apple crate – and read book after book, picking up the next as soon as she had set aside the last. The side of her index finger grew a little callus from the continuous turning of pages. When one location began to hurt her bones, she found another. Scouting for snacks in the kitchen, for there was nothing left to cook, she read the backs of food packages. When she brushed her teeth in the mornings – one of the few routines of her old life to which she still adhered – she read the backs of the bottles and jars in the cabinet so as not to have to look at the scum in the sink. Her eyes continued to scroll from left to right even when she slept, reading the blank backs of her eyelids. At the outset, the mail had piled up on the doormat, but this was the one thing she did not read. She kicked it under the shoe cabinet and forgot about it, and now there was nothing coming in from anywhere. All contact with the outside world was finally gone.

Iris stuffed a fistful of pork rinds into her mouth and lay listlessly on the sofa, half-watching television. The constant news reports blurred into a background drone. Accelerated course… unprecedented numbers… public coffers empty… scientists struggling to devise a vaccine…

With an effort, Iris peeled herself off the sofa. A grey-faced reporter said in gravelly tones, “In severe cases, the time between onset of symptoms and full metamorphosis may be only a matter of hours.”

Iris walked out of the room and regarded herself in the hallway mirror. Her familiar face stared solemnly back at her – a pale heart narrowing into a pointed chin, almost swallowed up by the mass of her pin-straight hair dissolving into the darkness of the hall behind her. The television flickered and an inane, syrupy tune poured out over the airwaves:

“If you don’t want to grow a pair of wings

Buckle up and listen to the words we sing!

Staying safe is easy as one – two – three:

STAY INSIIIIIIIDE! (Say it again!)

STAY INSIIIIIIDE! (Tell all your friends!)

‘Cause home’s our favourite place to be!”

It was so saccharine, Iris felt the urge to spit. Her thoughts, sluggish for so long, were slowly beginning to whir. An unaccustomed warmth crept to the surface of her skin.

Here’s what I know: I am seventeen and in good health. With regular exercise and a fair diet, I might easily live another sixty years or so.

Sixty years. That was older than her father, older than her mother. It was an absolute eternity. Was she going to spend it cooped up indoors simply because her family was gone? There was no sense in that. She saw it now. Staying indoors because she wanted to was one thing. Staying indoors because the stuffy old men with their full pockets and their fat bellies had told her to was quite another.

Slowly, deliberately, she opened the cupboard under the stairs and pulled the cord to turn on the light. Then she hunted for her boots. It had been months since she had touched them; a thin film of dust clouded the patent of the toes. She sat down in the clutter of raincoats and bent-spoked umbrellas and pulled the laces taut in slow motion, each cord strange and rough against her unaccustomed fingertips.

Steeling herself, she eased the front door open and, for the first time, looked out upon the new world.

The first few days were heaven. She had lived in this city all her life, but there were so many things she still hadn’t done – and that had been because there were always too many people around, fussing and clucking and staring and judging and putting her off the whole idea. Now, with so many dead and most others in a state of transformation, she practically had the whole place to herself. She waltzed into empty ice cream parlours and gorged herself on triple scoops of strawberry swirl, of peach sorbet, of mint choc chip with extra sprinkles, sucking glacé cherries off each fingertip. She shattered the windows of boutiques with Rose’s lacrosse stick and tried on expensive dresses and absurd hats that cost ten times her father’s annual salary. She broke into the library with some difficulty, finally shimmying up a drainpipe and squeezing in through an open window, and read until it got too dark to see. There was something so wonderfully naughty and illicit about her escapades. It was like being an archaeologist, unearthing secrets and gems that had been slumbering just below the surface of the city all this time. She wandered from screen to screen of the cinema and watched whatever had been left playing, idly shovelling popcorn into her mouth and lying across a whole row of seats. Usually at nightfall she went home to sleep, but sometimes she just made up a makeshift pillow of her coat and slept wherever she was. There was no danger anymore. The constant flutter of wings around her was soothing; it reminded her of autumn leaves caught in a sudden gust of wind. Some of the butterflies were obviously family groups, their colouring virtually identical, solemnly sucking at spilled drinks at shop counters or picking at mouldy cakes in the bakery’s display cases. They seemed resigned to their fate. The occasional loner, skittering through the sky in a frenzied panic, might alight precariously on Iris’ arm and ask for help, but she could sweep them off, pretend she hadn’t heard them. Husks of anonymous butterfly bodies littered the streets, clogging the gutters, cracking satisfyingly underfoot; the windows of all the shops were fogged with their dust.

She did still see the occasional human being – it was a rude shock every time, an intrusion on her absolute freedom – but they always seemed to be hurrying home, guiltily clutching haphazard parcels of stolen medicines or groceries to their chests, or avoiding her eye as they trundled down the street with wheelbarrows of goods, and paid her little heed. She was relieved not to have to interact with them. These encounters grew less and less frequent until she realised one day that she hadn’t seen another living soul for an entire week. One week turned into two turned into three, and then she knew she’d won a game she hadn’t even realised she’d been playing. Nobody asked her for money on the street or yelled at her to do her chores or hogged the bathroom or told her “No”. It made her heart swell with wicked joy she tried to suppress at first, but ultimately allowed to swell and flourish like a poisonous vine sprouting deadly blooms. How incredible it was that her heart’s secret wish had been fulfilled! How lucky, lucky, lucky she was to have her very own world!

On a fine day that had suddenly turned overcast, she got caught in a sudden deluge. A hundred thousand butterfly corpses instantly turned into mulch, their scent rising sweetish and sickly from the pavement. Iris pulled her coat tighter around her throat and ran for the nearest shop awning. Out of habit, she picked up a stone to crack the window, but when she tried the door, it was already unlocked.

She entered and glanced around inquisitively, her lank hair dripping. She squeezed it out, then did the same with her skirt, making small puddles on the tiles.

The shop smelled musty, and some of the shutters were down, but only partly, as if they had been tugged at with great haste. It had the air of a cave. A swallowtail floated in a recently-abandoned mug of coffee. Behind one changing room curtain, a single cabbage white, disintegrating in a tangle of sequinned cloth. Iris reached up to touch the hems of the bleached white tennis skirts, remembering Rose. The pretty pleats swung gently overhead. Half-dressed mannequins stood to attention; Iris derived childish pleasure from manipulating their limbs into compromising poses, until one heavy white arm sheared clean off in her hands. She left the female mannequin crudely groping the flat plastic crotch of the male, and used the arm to sift through the racks of costumes.

A gauzy lavender gown caught her eye. Iris was not usually one for finery, but this was something else. It was somewhere between a ballerina’s tutu and a ballgown, with a stiff satin bodice and a long, rustling skirt comprising featherlike layers of tulle. Before she could stop and think about it, she gave into the urge, wriggling into the dress and lacing a pair of discarded ballet shoes all the way up her calves with satin ribbon. Then she posed.

A stupid gawky girl glared out of the mirror – flat where she should have been rounded, stiff where she should have been malleable, black-eyed and black-haired and black-hearted. Resentment turned to ashes in her mouth. She wasn’t Rose. What was she trying to achieve?

Her own clothes were still soaked through; she was loath to struggle back into them, a sticky second skin. In a sudden burst of rage she hurled the mannequin’s arm at the mirror. Glass fragments exploded all over the shop, coating the chairs and the floor with dangerous glitter. Iris turned away and headed home.

The house on Wilbur Drive was as cold as a tomb. Her breath billowed before her as she tiptoed through the hall.

Shivering convulsively, she hastened to ignite the fire in the kitchen with numb fingers – but of course, there was no gas. Her dead father could no longer pay the bills.

She sat back on her heels and considered. There was nothing stopping her striking a match, setting her mother’s romance novels alight – that was really all they were good for, wasn’t it?

But no – she knew she wouldn’t. She couldn’t bring herself to do it. She couldn’t bear to move the ironed school uniforms or the newspapers or the Teach Yourself French cassettes because they were just as her mother and father and sister had left them.

Suddenly the house no longer seemed to belong to her. It was a museum, a memorial to untimely loss. A great weight of sadness settled like sediment in the pit of her stomach.

It was her eighteenth birthday.

She was cold. Her ballet slippers were already filthy and wearing through at the toes. The dance costume was starting to look tawdry now, the hem unpicked, the skirt trailing lace and satin, but still she kept moving, hastening through the ruined streets with a sob in her throat and a chill in her bones. It was the end of the party. It was the end of the world. It was time for all this to be over forever.

Where was she going? She didn’t know, but she had to leave this town. She half-walked, half-ran, blinded by tears, through streets she had never seen before – overturned dustbins, bicycles without wheels, homeless encampments. The stench of wet cardboard and urine. Out of breath, she finally pressed her palms to a graffitied wall and leaned against it, hair hanging down, staring at the ground. Desperation yielded to calm, which became clarity. What was she thinking? She couldn’t just leave. She was being impulsive where she needed to be rational. Whatever awaited her beyond here, it wasn’t going to be good. She would need warmer clothes, proper shoes, candles, matches, tinned food. Supplies. She was profoundly hungry, she realised – hungry not for stolen sweets but for real food. What she wouldn’t give for a hot stew of real meat and veggies grown in the garden! Even if she were somehow able to find the ingredients now, she wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to prepare them. Violet had tried to teach her, but she had never listened, thinking herself above such household drudgery…

She was hurting now, yearning in a deep-down place she was unable to reach. Having stepped across the threshold of adolescence into adulthood, she wanted more than anything to be mothered, to be babied. She looked around, praying for a sign, waiting for direction.

In an upstairs window of a terraced house across the street, a single light was burning.

She crept through the unkempt grass of the front garden, strewn with crisp packets and empty cans of energy drink like so many strange flowers. The door had been left ajar, or – more likely – prised open at some point. In the pitch black hall, she stepped on the rim of a dog bowl, which spun and clanged as she stepped back, startled. Pressing her lips together, she followed the subtle glow along the landing…

A moon-shaped nightlight glimmered faintly in what would once have been a child’s bedroom. Covering every surface was a fine coating of butterfly dust, thicker than anywhere she’d seen it yet; the floor was invisible under layers of brittle and broken butterfly bodies. It brought tears to Iris’ eyes to picture them – fluttering in their thousands around this abandoned beacon, clinging to light and life. Gently, so gently, she picked it up – it was lighter than she’d thought – and carried it to the other bedroom.

The adults’ wardrobe was mostly empty, save a few odds and ends. Sifting through them, she found a shift of grey wool. It had a small tear in the back, but that could be mended, and it would keep her warm.

The blankets of the couple’s bed were like ice, but she pressed her hands between her knees and hunkered down and gradually, a small pocket of warmth formed around her. She turned on the radio on the nightstand  and left it running all night, trying to convince herself that the missives of doom and the shipping forecast were the soothing burble of her parent’s voices.

The radioactive quality of the light woke her at dawn. Blinking the plum-coloured blurs out of her vision, she padded slowly down the stairs, her hand trailing along the dusty banister. She ate a handful of nuts from a packet and picked the mites out of a small bowl of dry cornflakes. Old orange stains of baby food blemished the formica table. Pale rectangles marked the walls where family photographs had once hung. She put the empty bowl in the sink and headed out.

The lake was placid and still as a sheet of grey-green glass. The dry reeds said hush, hush as she ascended to the boardwalk, but there was no-one left to whom she could have betrayed their secrets. Sitting at the edge, she let her legs hang into empty space, tendrils of hair softly rising and falling in the occasional breeze, watching the nothingness for a long time.

Then she spotted it.

A timid whisper of colour; a mere suggestion of life, balancing on a single bulrush stem.

She made a curved bowl of her hands and closed her fingers around the city’s final butterfly.

Instantly six hair-thin legs braced themselves against her palm: confused, waiting. Two tiny antennae drooped dolefully, soft as a sigh. Maybe the little creature was saying something to her, some profound last words, a final message to the world: she listened, but could not hear. She felt the fragile wings flutter like eyelashes, tickling her palms, then fold against each other with subjugate grace and fall still.

Iris lifted her thumbs. There it was. A compact, dead little parcel. A life story folded into a pretty envelope.

She put the envelope into the pocket of her skirt and walked towards the seared white scar of the horizon as the sunset bled crimson and flame and gold over Butterfly City.



BIO

A translator by trade, Lesley Warren lives for language. Born in Wales and now resident in Germany, her work encompasses themes of alienation, identity and “otherness”. Her poetry and prose have appeared in a variety of journals, anthologies and a podcast. 










Park Shitty

by Melissa Or


I never knew CD’s real name. I just knew that’s what they called him because his eyes flattened into thin CD-like slits when he was stoned. Perhaps if I were in the same grade as those guys, I would have heard teachers call CD by his legal name, but I was five years younger than they were. Thinking back now, I was much too young to be hanging around high school seniors. Especially those seniors.

It might sound strange that they tolerated a dorky middle schooler tagging along, but even guys like that, especially guys like that, needed something to believe in. You’re gonna be the one who gets out, they’d tell me again and again, as if repeating it would eventually will it into fruition. I think they needed to hear it more than I did. Especially CD. He was my older sister’s boyfriend, which is how I got to know those guys in the first place. He didn’t seem to give a shit about my sister, but he was invested in making sure that I did something with my life. It didn’t really matter what that something was, but everyone seemed to think it required getting out of Park City. Which was fine by me.

The thing with Park City was that if you happened to spot it on a map and see it nestled all cozy between the Great South Bay on Long Island’s southern shoreline and the swank star-studded Hamptons to the east, you’d surely mistake it for one of the island’s many quaint beach villages. You’d imagine this perfect little town where yuppies draped sweaters over their shoulders as they walked in and out of small expensive shops that all looked the same; and not only would you picture sidewalks, but you’d also line them with flowers and street lamps; and your mind would probably also build a charming brick schoolhouse with a flag that had never been defaced and a roof that had never leaked. But for some reason Park City, even the name of the town itself, never lived up to its potential. It had been established by an obscure signer of the Declaration of Independence who happened to settle there in 1770 with ambitions of creating an international port and commercial center. Sadly, the town never grew up to become the “city” its founder had envisioned. Nor did it ever contain an actual “park” unless you counted the area beside the landfill that had been fenced off to protect migrating birds who stopped in for quickies on their way to South America. We called that overgrown strip of land the Bird Brothel, and it sort of functioned more or less like a park because it was where a lot of kids went to try drugs or sex for the first time.

Later on, when I did get out, and I would tell people that I was from Long Island, I saw how their eyes would adorn with visions of Gatsby’s gilded Eggs, and although I knew I was misleading them, I didn’t want to explain that I had grown up in the only south shore town that never became a summer tourist destination for celebrity Manhattanites. Instead of multi-million dollar beach estates enclosed by behemoth hedges and electric fences, my home town was known for its abundance of Section Eight housing. Before I met him, CD spray-painted over Park City’s welcome sign in order to announce to anyone who exited the main road for a pit stop on their way to the Hamptons, that they were “Now Entering Park City Shitty.” The sign was replaced about a year later, but the name stuck. That’s the thing with identities, they just get lodged in people’s heads, and after a while there’s no way to extract them.

CD looked out for me in the only way he knew how, by creating an ever-expanding list of drugs that I was never, under any circumstance whatsoever, to even pretend to try. He wrote his list on one of those long shopping pads that had a refrigerator magnet on the back. He said these were drugs that could fuck a person up so badly that I had to swear on my grandmother’s grave to abstain from trying, no matter how tempted I might be. (You’d think since he was dating my sister, he would have known that all of my grandparents were still alive.) There were so many drugs on his list, and he seemed to add to it every time I came over, that I was sure some must have been repeated or made up. It was three pages deep and included a lot of substances that I had never heard of, and some that I had heard of but never thought of as intoxicants. I remember wondering what it was about those particular drugs that made them worse than others. After all, I had grown up in the Nancy Reagan era, when we were told that all illicit drugs were created with equal capacity to scramble a kid’s brain up like the egg in the commercial that aired during After School Specials.

CD used to hang out with these two other guys, Rod and Hoff. Rod was the first emancipated minor I ever knew. His father got so fucked up one night that he beat the shit out of Rod while he was sound asleep in his bed, so Rod got a lawyer to help him file for emancipation. This was the first time I heard the word “emancipation” used in a way that was not associated with slavery. It was also the first time I heard of anyone going to court to gain a right instead of having one taken away. A judge granted Rod’s request, and the government let him live in one of the subsidized apartments off the highway. He got a small studio above the Roy Rogers, which was convenient when we got the munchies. You see, CD said, lawyers make so much money that they can do cases like Rod’s for free. That’s what I’m talking about. What are you talking about, Rod asked? No one ever knows what he’s talking about, Hoff said. For the Nerd, CD said, referring to me. That’s what I’m talking about for the Nerd. For when she grows up and gets the fuck out of here. Attorney General Nerd or some shit like that. I looked up at the mention of my nickname, but my fingers were deep in Rod’s ashtray, fishing for roaches to take home with me, and Rod said, Yeah, that’s real lawyer material right there, and we all laughed.

Although Rod was a dealer, Hoff was the real thing. Pretty much everything about Hoff was next-level. He was particularly compulsive about things that really mattered to him, which meant that he had a ripped body, an impeccable car, and an endless series of tanned, toned girlfriends he met at the gym. Not to mention his lucrative drug business. He actually used to grow his own weed on the side of Sunrise Highway, up in the woods where no one would go except maybe for some animals. We used to joke about all the deer that must have been inadvertently getting high back there. Hoff really had it going on back then. At some point, his harvest was so plentiful that he had to hire a couple of those guys who stood on the side of the road by the exit ramps holding “Will Work for Food” signs. They were good workers, Hoff said, even if they couldn’t speak much English. He paid them in actual money and weed instead of just food, and he said they were priceless because they were too afraid of getting deported to report him. Hoff also dealt a lot of the drugs that were on CD’s no-no list. The list was for me, not for the guys.

Like Rod, Hoff had his own apartment, but not because he was emancipated. Because he was earning a ton of money and his parents didn’t seem to notice or care that he moved out. But there was no way Hoff would let us over to his place because he was a real clean freak. Everyone knew that he vacuumed his apartment every day just before he left, and that he was so obsessive-compulsive about the whole thing that the vacuum tracks had to be perfectly straight and parallel with the wall, and if they weren’t, he’d start over again. He was so nuts about those lines on his carpet that he would vacuum backwards, all the while edging towards the front door, where he would eventually leave the vacuum in order to avoid defiling the perfectly straight carpet lines. That’s why Hoff was late all the time, and everyone would poke fun at him for it, saying he was late because he was doing lines.

The last time I saw Hoff must have been about eight years ago in what used to be the Roy Rogers below Rod’s old apartment. At that time, it was a 7-11, and I was in a hurry to grab a coffee before catching the train back to Manhattan after visiting my folks. I brushed right past him without realizing who he was.

Jessica’s Sister, he said. Hey, Nerd! How are you?

I recognized his voice, but when I turned to face him, he looked nothing like the Hoff I knew from the old days, even though it had only been a few years since I had graduated from high school. Instead of the well-toned and manicured guy I used to know, the one whose artificial tan had accentuated a beaming white toothy smile, Hoff now appeared before me as an old, almost grotesque, stranger. Even his posture was different. He used to have the starchy upright stance of a weightlifter, but now he was sort of hunched and weathered, like a tarped Weber grill in winter. Several of his teeth had rotted out, and his T-shirt looked like it had been plucked from one of those Goodwill bins outside the Stop & Shop.

How’s your sister? How’s your family? How’s…He threw questions at me frenetically, but he was sweet and genuine, happy to see me. How’s the big city life treating you, he asked and then laughed for no reason, which made me self-conscious. I felt dozens of judgmental eyes peer straight through soda displays and Slurpee signs, and hone in on me as if to ask what a young woman dressed like President Clinton’s wife was doing chatting with a homeless meth head. Not that he was homeless. At least I don’t think he was. But those eyes went right through my pants suit, and I swear they saw me for who I really was.

Later, when I told my sister about running into Hoff, she said, And this used to be the guy who was so OCD that he vacuumed himself out of his house. Used to be— as though he was not the same guy. You know, she said, Hoff should have died a long time ago. And angry as that made me, I imagined this very scenario: Hoff disappearing in his prime, when he was still smiling like Knight Rider or oiling his abs like the guy in Baywatch, before our shitty little town dug its shitty little meth-rot teeth into him. Not to sound callous though, because dying too early, no matter how honorable the death, is no prize either, and I know this because that’s exactly what happened to CD’s little brother, Bruce.

Bruce was the same age as I was, but I never saw him at school because he was in special classes. Sometimes he would hang around with CD, but the guys never called him anything but his real name, even though he was an easy target for a nickname due to his cognitive impairment. CD wouldn’t tolerate so much as a joke made at Bruce’s expense. Their whole family was protective of him, actually. Their dad coached Bruce’s baseball team for the sole purpose of making sure that the other players wouldn’t make fun of him. CD told me that if I played on the team, his dad would look out for me too. You got brains, but you need a scholarship if you’re gonna actually go to college and be a lady lawyer, and there’s really no money in softball, CD said. I figured he was right, and I joined the team.

CD’s dad did look after me as best he could, but since I was the only girl in the league, I had to endure a surprising amount of shit-talking from the opposing players. The parents were the worst though. They’d actually yell things at me like, Girls can’t hit, you cunt! And, Put the bat down and pick up a spatula. A fucking spatula? That’s what they came up with to insult me? Grown adults telling a kid she was a cunt in need of a spatula? Even then, I knew I shouldn’t let that nonsense get in the way of my performance. After all, I was a better player than most of the guys in the league, and I was sure that only a few of them would have made the girls’ varsity softball team at school. Not that they would have wanted to try. It’s just that even though they weren’t much competition for me, it was their attitude about who I should be that posed the real challenge.

Admittedly, the harassment got to me more often than it should have. I didn’t have terribly high self-esteem to begin with. During one at-bat early in the season, a mom yelled, Join the God-damned Girl Scouts!, just as I swung and missed on a third strike. Everyone laughed, even my own teammates. The catcher chuckled and sorta snorted behind his mask, then he dropped the ball, so I booked it to first base. Apparently, I was the only nerd on the field who knew the rules. The other team’s coach screamed for the catcher to throw the ball. Throw it! Throw it, he shouted, it’s a freakin’ dropped-third-strike!

When I think about it now, I imagine the catcher must have been confused, but I don’t know for sure because I didn’t look back. I just ran down the line with all the rage of a girl who needed to prove her worth. The first baseman was standing right on the bag with his arm stretched stupidly over the baseline. His glove was wide open, and I could see his eyes as they followed the ball over my head toward his mitt. What an idiot, I thought as I ran through him. My body met his just as the ball reached his glove, and I stepped on the bag as he fell to the ground and the ball trickled toward the foul line. The umpire stretched his arms and yelled, Safe!, and my whole team cheered as though we won a championship game or something. Then two parents came out to walk the first baseman off the field. He was sniffling, trying not to cry. I stayed on the base like I owned it. I wanted to run to second because no one had actually called a time out and the ball was technically still in play, but I refrained.

I sort of knew that kid who played first. His name was Neil, and he was in my photography class. He didn’t have friends in the class because he constantly walked into the dark room when other people were in the middle of developing their film, and it would just fuck up everyone’s photos. He was that kind of kid, and I suspected he was told a hundred times not to stand on the baseline just as Mr. Fox, our art teacher, told him not to go in the darkroom when the red light was on. I felt bad that I knocked him down, but that was the rule– if a fielder is in the baseline, the runner still has the right of way. Yet, I felt sorry for Neil because a girl had taken him out, which was just about the most humiliating thing a girl could do to a guy, aside from laughing at his prick. But I didn’t feel too bad because the incident made my teammates actually like me. Even later in the season, they would still take turns imitating how I threw up my elbow just before ramming into Neil. That pussy deserved to get plowed by The Girl, they would say. They called me, The Girl. I liked that name better than Jessica’s Sister or Nerd.

One day I got to practice early, and only the Tommys were there. As I leaned my bike against the fence, I saw Tall Tommy shoving his fingers under Ugly Tommy’s nose, and Ugly Tommy said, Damn, that pussy smells sweet– I wouldn’t ever wash my hands if I was you. They didn’t stop talking about Jenna Passanti’s sweet smell on Tall Tommy’s fingers, even when they turned to see that it was The Girl who was walking toward them. I just sat on the bench and didn’t say anything. Tall Tommy passed me the joint they had been sharing, and I took a long hit, even though I was afraid I might catch an STD, being that it was only one degree removed from Jenna Passanti’s crotch.

About a month later, on the first day of tenth grade, Jenna Passanti was found in the woods just inside the Bird Brothel. She was partially naked and all beat up by her boyfriend, Pete Mason. Pete was one of those kids who wore Polo shirts and had a nice smile and who said all the right things, but who was really a fucking douchebag, my sister said. She said this before Pete beat up Jenna, so I guess it was sorta well-known that he was no good. Jenna was in my grade though, so she probably didn’t know that the older kids thought Pete was an asshole.

Channel 12 News, the Long Island TV station, was obsessed with the whole thing. It reported that Jenna had made fun of the way Pete performed sexually, and that was why Pete beat the living shit out of her and then sexually assaulted her. So then Mr. Pearl, the Health teacher, made us watch every video he could find on date rape. This was in addition to the usual scare-tactic videos he used to show us, including the documentary that featured real-life addicts shooting heroin into their eyeballs because there were no other viable places left on their bodies to inject needles. It was depressing. We all swore we’d never do heroin or let a guy beat us up, but we also knew that the odds were that some of us would. I hated high school, even though I got good grades, and I just wanted to cut and hang out with CD and Rod and Hoff, who had already graduated, but those guys wouldn’t tolerate me missing school. Eventually, we all just went our separate ways.

A year after I graduated from high school, and a few years before I ran into Hoff at the 7-11, CD’s brother, Bruce, got shit-faced at Mr. Lucky’s Pub. He decided to do the prudent thing and walk home, leaving his old Skylark on the graveled pathway behind the bar that served as Mr. Lucky’s parking lot. About half-way home, Bruce was struck by a drunk driver and killed instantly. He was left on the side of Sunrise Highway until the early morning when a cop happened to slow down to watch some deer grazing nearby and then noticed Bruce face-down in the grass.

I was so far removed from that whole scene by then that I probably wouldn’t have known about Bruce dying if I didn’t happen to be in Park City at the time on a break from college. I went to the wake. All the boys were there. CD, of course, and Rod and Hoff. The Tommys were also there, as were most of the other players from our team. The funeral home was packed, so most of us had to hang outside, which was fine with me because I did not want to see Bruce lying dead in a coffin at nineteen years old.

After the wake, a bunch of us went to the diner, and we sat at one of those round booths in the corner where they put large groups. CD shared a story about this one time when he went to the diner with Bruce and Hoff. Bruce had wanted to order one of the cakes in the display case. Not just a slice of it, but the whole cake for the three of them to share. This was after Bruce had gotten a job at the hardware store due to some government program that compensated local businesses for hiring people with disabilities. Bruce was so proud to get the job that he wanted to treat his older brother and his friend, and ordering a whole cake seemed like the best kind of celebration that a guy like Bruce could conjure up in his generous, childish head. CD said no, that they would have come across as being really high had they eaten the whole cake. But we are high, Bruce apparently pleaded. We all laughed because it was funny as hell, and it really captured Bruce’s personality. He would say shit like that all the time, and it would have us laughing really hard, even though Bruce wasn’t trying to be funny. The beautiful thing about Bruce was that he saw everything as it really was, and there really was nothing even a tiny bit funny about the way things actually happened to be.

The waitress came over to take our order, and CD said, We’ll take a whole cake from the display case. Without even looking up at us, the waitress said, The only cake that’s still whole is carrot. So then give us the whole fucking carrot cake, CD said, and she wrote it down on her pad as if it were something she could potentially forget. She walked away, and Tall Tommy said, I wonder if she wrote “whole carrot cake” or “the whole fucking carrot cake.” Then we all went outside into the back of Tall Tommy’s van to take bong hits.

Isn’t this the bong that your mom took, Rod asked, and Tall Tommy said that his mom actually didn’t confiscate his bong, that he must have just lost it because it recently resurfaced. How the fuck do you lose a bong, Ugly Tommy asked. And how the fuck does it just resurface, Rod added. Maybe your mom borrowed it, I said, and the guys all laughed pretty hard. Don’t hog it, CD said, pass it to the Nerd. Are you allowed to smoke weed at Columbia, Tall Tommy asked. Ugly Tommy said, It’s the biggest drug country in the world, of course she can smoke there. She’s at Columbia University, not Colombia the country, you dumbass, CD said, and we all laughed and Ugly Tommy had a huge coughing fit, which made us laugh even more.

We must have reeked when we went back inside the diner. The carrot cake was on the table already sliced and waiting for us along with a stack of plates and napkins. Oh, this is gonna be the best cake ever, Hoff said, and then he added, here’s to Bruce! To Bruce, we all said and for a moment we all felt sober, thinking of poor Bruce doing the right thing and walking home from Mr. Lucky’s. Then Hoff continued, you see where being responsible gets you– gets you dead, that’s where.

We recalled Hoff saying that a couple of years later when we went to the diner after his wake. Being irresponsible gets you dead too, CD said, and we all toasted to Hoff. Then Rod talked about the days when Hoff used to vacuum himself out of his apartment and we all fell silent as we scraped cake crumbs from our plates. What are you doing here, CD said, I thought you got out? You say that like Park City is a prison, I said. It is, they all said in unison. Hey, what are you studying anyway? Shouldn’t you be done with college already? I’m in law school now, I said. Jeez, Nerd!, they all said in unison. Are you going to be a prosecutor, Tall Tommy asked. No, I said, I don’t know, I mean I don’t really like law school. Then the Tommys got up and reenacted the time when I knocked Neil down at first base, and everyone hooted and hollered, and some gray-haired couple turned toward us, rolling their tired eyes passive-aggressively at our brief joyous moment. Seriously, Nerd, what the fuck are you doing here with us, CD pressed. I don’t know, I said. I’m just home on break and then Hoff died and now I’m here fucking around with you guys. How’s your sister, CD asked? She’s alright. She’s engaged to Phil. I always liked your sister, CD said. No you didn’t, I said, You thought she was pretty, maybe, but you didn’t like her. Yeah, she was hot, CD said, and then added, but soon she’s gonna be fat and pregnant with a bunch of little Phils. And they all laughed pretty hard. Really, you need to stop hanging out with us, CD said. Yeah, one day you might prosecute us, Rod said. And no one laughed even a little.

The next time I went back to Park City was for Jessica and Phil’s wedding. None of the guys were invited. My sister wasn’t friends with them anymore. But after the wedding, I met some of them at the diner. I’m not sure why. I was drunk from the wedding and over my head with stress from studying for the Bar Exam, and I didn’t have any other friends in the area. That’s like the hardest test on earth, Ugly Tommy said. She’ll pass, CD said. Then to me, he said, You gotta stop hanging out with us. Then the two of us went outside to where the cigarette machines used to be and did a few bumps of coke off our knuckles. You gotta promise me you’ll get the fuck out of here, he said. Park Shitty’s not that shitty, I said. He smiled and said, then why does it feel so shitty? He had this boyish smile, but this time when he laughed, I could tell his teeth were getting that meth-head rot, and it was sad but also not sad. It’s as though I saw him the way that his little brother Bruce would have seen him: just as he was. No more, no less.

CD suddenly stopped smiling and he looked straight at me and said, You gotta promise me you’ll get the fuck out, you have to make the promise. You always say that, but I already am out, I said. No, you still have a foot here in this shitty town. We left the diner without saying goodbye to the others, and we tip-toed into my parents’ house, into my childhood room, into my bed. We did a few lines of coke off of my Con Law textbook, which CD thought was hilarious. Come on, quote the Constitution he said, and then he deepened his voice and declared, Four score and seven years–

That’s not the fucking Constitution, I said. You must think I’m an idiot, he said and tossed the textbook from my lap, and then he got annoyed at how much coke was wasted on the floor. Don’t be an asshole, I said. He turned to me and pinned me down by my wrists. I told you to get the fuck out of here, he said. His eyes were like two huge holes. There was no emotion to them, but his voice was angry and jittery from the coke. Come on, tough girl, you’re supposed to be a badass. He pushed down hard on my wrists, and I said nothing, just stared at him, feeling his weight press me deeper into the bed, and I wanted to stay there pinned by my desires and my past for perpetuity.

He suddenly let go of my wrists and unzipped my jeans. He looked at me as if to ask if I was sure I wanted to keep going, but I just stared at him. He was not a good fuck, and I wasn’t either. Afterwards, we lay vacuously next to each other, and he said, your tits are hotter than your sister’s. That’s kinda gross to think about, I said. But it felt good to hear. He kissed my forehead with a tenderness that felt like a pat on the head and then he did two lines off my stomach. That was fucking awesome, he said, lifting his head from my belly and rubbing his nose with his fist, and I got the feeling that he was mimicking something he had seen in a movie. Wasn’t that fucking awesome, he said. What, I wanted to ask, but instead I said, The Constitution, Article I, Section 1: All legislative powers shall be granted to a Congress. It wasn’t an exact quote by any means, but it didn’t matter.

You gotta be fuckin’ kidding me, Nerd, he said with that decaying boyish smile, then he dipped down to lick some stray coke off my belly. I liked the way his tongue was warm and adoring, as though it felt lucky to be able to taste my skin. I can’t believe you exist and you chose to fuck me, he whispered, I mean, why the fuck did you fuck me? You know where I’m gonna end up, don’t you? Where, I asked? He just shook his head.

The next morning, my dad banged on my door and yelled at me to get up before my pancakes got cold. CD must have snuck out at some point after I fell asleep. He would have gotten a kick out of the way my dad folded the pancakes into mini chocolate-chip tacos.

The last I heard, when CD’s mom went to visit him in the hospital, she was taken aback by his painted fingernails. She saw the polished nails first, then the restraints which tightly bound his wrists to the bed rails, then the bruises on his eyes and chin. The innkeeper–or whatever you call him–found CD earlier that morning in a ground-floor room of the Park City Motel, dressed in drag, lying in his own piss and blood. Can you believe I dated that guy, my sister said. He’s such a loser, prostituting himself out for meth or God knows what.

It was Black Friday, and we were in my parents’ kitchen. Jessica was taking out the Thanksgiving leftovers to make sandwiches. She had separated from Phil, and she and her two girls had been staying with my parents for almost a year already. She knew where everything was kept, the bread, the mayonnaise, the cutting boards. I paced around the kitchen, thinking of the soft, deliberate, even delicate motion of CD’s tongue on my skin. Then I suddenly wondered what color his nails had been painted and whether he had painted them himself. CD was once the kind of person who would have laughed at a man who polished his nails and pimped himself out for drugs.

Oh my God, what a loser, Jessica kept saying, what a fucking loser. OK, damn it, I yelled. Jess, we get the picture. He’s a fucking loser. We got it loud and clear. A. God. Damned. Fucking. Loser. My sister’s youngest daughter was about three at the time, and she kind of looked like I did at her age, with two curly pig-tails on either side of her chubby face. She was sitting on the kitchen floor playing with some Tupperware, staring up at me with her mouth open, and when I looked down at her, she began to cry in that slow way that starts with a confused look, a quivering lip, then finally tears. Oh great, thanks a lot sis, Jessica said.

I took Jessica’s minivan and drove to the diner, but by then the diner had gone out of business and a Family Dollar had sprouted up in its place. When did that happen, I wondered. I smoked up in the parking lot and thought about the organizations that I could create to help people get back on their feet before they end up like CD. But I knew I wouldn’t actually do any such thing. I had already put in my dues at the firm and would be named partner by the end of the year if I continued to play my cards right, so there was no time for charitable work. Then suddenly I was startled by the rapping of knuckles on the passenger-side window.

I turned toward the noise, and a large, pale police officer peered at me through the condensation on the window pane. He made a circular motion with his fist, signaling for me to roll down the window. I did, and he asked, What are you doing? That’s when I realized the joint was still in my mouth, and I thought to myself, this is it, this is the end of everything. Forget partner, you’re fucked.

Dom Harris, one of the firm’s managing partners, told us associates that if we ever got into trouble, we shouldn’t lie. It’s the lie that gets you disbarred, not the indiscretion, he said. Then he added, but at home, to your spouse, you lie like a God-damned rug because the truth gets you fucked in the ass when it comes time for the divorce. However, this wasn’t a curbside blow job or whatever it was that Dom was into. This was weed, and although it’s not a big deal now, it certainly was then. And, I hate to say it, but I also happened to have some other drugs in my purse that would have made CD’s no-no list had he kept it up to date. I had to use every ounce of self-control I had left in my body to avoid glancing at the purse, which was right there on the passenger seat. If I allowed just one flutter of an eyelash to tilt over in its direction, I would have been doomed. Such a look would have been the sort of self-sabotaging giveaway that separates the successful people from the losers of the world. Instead, I concentrated on holding the cop’s gaze and trying not to shift my eyes in any direction whatsoever.

He shined his flashlight through the open window, ignoring the purse and focusing instead on me. I felt exposed for the phony I was. He stared at me long and hard, and he seemed to be thinking or recalling something from his past. Did he know me? He looked a little like everyone I had grown up with but no one person in particular.

What do you think you’re looking at, I wanted to say, but I knew what he was seeing. In the halo of his Maglite sat a displaced woman in designer business-casual clothing who happened to have a joint dangling from her lips. Wearing that sort of Saks get-up in Park City always made me feel like I was playing dress up, as if I were an imposter who would at any moment be discovered for the loser she always was. Finally, the moment was here, the gig was about to be up, and it felt, oddly enough, liberating. Free from having to be the Girl or the Nerd or the Lawyer, or Jessica’s Sister or the One Who Would Make it Out (Who Did Make it Out), I could just be another shitty loser in this shitty town. It felt like failure, and it was fucking invigorating.

I tilted my head back, inhaled as deeply as I could, and through a blissful swirl of exhaling smoke, I whispered so softly that the officer had to lean his head into the car and over my pill-packed purse to hear: Don’t you know, I said, I’m an undercover prosecutor.

He smiled, shaking his head at my calm audacity. Then he laughed out loud in a boyish way that reminded me of CD in the old days, before his teeth started to go bad. Get rid of the drugs, he said.

I opened the driver’s side window and dropped what was left of the joint into the parking lot. He laughed again, Undercover prosecutor, he said under his breath, that’s a good one. To him, the truth was funny. He didn’t see things the way they really were, not the way CD’s dead brother used to, not the way I was starting to.

Now get the hell out of here, he said.

I’m trying. I’m fucking trying.



BIO

Melissa Or crafts fiction that gives voice to the small, unspoken stories that exist beneath life’s many silences. Her characters both belong and do not belong. They are outsiders, whether in their own countries, their own families, or their own minds. She is writing a novel and a collection of short stories. 

Artwork: Image by McZ







No Toe in the Water

by Patricia Ann Bowen



Mom, my sister Rachel, and I boarded the Zurich Flughafen train to Forch in northern Switzerland, accompanying our mother to end her own life by her own hand in her own pragmatic way. Here we were, on foreign land, on a mission to an even more foreign one, minus our brother who “couldn’t get away” from his law firm, much as we’d all expected, as he’d never had a good relationship with our headstrong mother, even as a likewise headstrong child.

Though nearly ninety, our mother wasn’t as frail as people decades younger, and she’d remained more frugal than most. Raised in New England by German immigrant parents, she told us our family members had certain values stamped on their birth certificates, and low-cost public transportation fit right in with those sensibilities. Besides, she loved trains. We all did. She used to take us as children on Amtrak from Boston to Montreal where we toured the zoo and the flower shows, and on the way she’d have us follow along on an unwieldy paper map spread across the table between our bench seats, pointing out each town and site of interest.

The economical train ride we were on now was the last leg of her last trip.

We helped her manage the short walk from the train station to the three-room apartment arranged by Dignified Dying, the association that assisted folks like us with all the details for such procedures. We gained access to the accommodation with a door code, programmed to the year Mom was born, 1936, so we wouldn’t forget it. The place was one cut above spartan, at least by American standards, but comfortable. A small open living room/kitchenette combination, a guest room with twin beds, and a room where my mother would self-administer her cocktail of lethal drugs. Hers held a queen bed covered with overstuffed down pillows and an equally overstuffed off-white duvet surrounded by four high-backed wooden chairs with green seat cushions. A sideboard held candles, drinking glasses, notepads, and pens.

A medical assistant came by minutes after we arrived, along with a volunteer who turned out to be a student working toward her degree in Social Psychology. They were pleasant and patient as they helped us unpack and settle in while we endured a final round of verbal legalisms and paperwork. In their presence, we met on Zoom with the prescribing physician, one of the same ones Mom had Zoomed with from her home back in the States. It was late morning by the time our guardians left, and we had forty-four more hours to spend with our mother because she had forty-four more hours remaining in her life.

–  –  –

Mom had invited Rachel and me to her home for brunch on a fragrant early spring morning six months ago. After the hazelnut coffee, avocado toast, and carrot muffins were consumed, but for one more cup of coffee out on the deck of her condo, while robins and wrens conversed in the nearby trees, she asked us to help her die with dignity. She said each year her world was getting smaller, she’d outlived all of her siblings and cousins… everyone who’d known her “when”, each year her body allowed her less and less choice of what she was able to do, and every year she added at least one new medical specialist to the roster of physicians approved by her insurance provider.

“This year’s is a neurologist,” she said, “and her diagnostic gift for me is Parkinson’s. So I want to put a stop to this, get it over with. You both know I’m not like those dainty ninnies who step into the swimming pool one toe at a time, making their whole body tremble again and again with each caress of deeper water. I’d rather jump in all at once, immerse myself in the reality. I prefer to ‘just do it.’”

Mom told us she’d been researching assisted dying for the past few years. We knew that her dearest friend, Sydelle, had wanted that way out and enlisted a nurse friend to help her when the time came. When it did come, the nurse friend reneged, and Sydelle sunk into sadness, sedentariness, and senility, claiming to all who would hear her that she was just waiting… waiting to die. “That won’t be me,” Mom said. “I won’t let it. I want to go to Switzerland, be one of those suicide tourists, and I want the two of you to help me.”

“That isn’t funny,” I said. “How can you joke about dying?”

“She’s not joking, Rose,” Rachel said. “She’s being Mom. I can’t say that I agree with what she’s asking us to do. I have to think it through. But I don’t want to see the dark future she’s projecting for herself any more than she does.”

“No, it’s too much to ask, Mom. I can’t help you kill yourself.” Tears were flooding my eyes.

“But you can watch me go further downhill every time you see me?” She locked her hands onto the arms of her chair, leaned forward, glared at me, and raised her voice like she was talking to a recalcitrant child. “Is that about you or about me? Do I have to live a life of increasing misery because you want me to?” She wagged a finger at me and laughed. “Bad girl.”

“You know she’s right,” Rachel said. “If you won’t help her, I will. But I think you should. And Robert, too. This is more than Mom’s issue; we should all own it.”

“That’s sweet of you, dear. I knew if anyone would see things my way it would be you.”

Oh, her little digs. I loved my mother dearly, but she had a way of trashing my feelings with her offhand remarks. My sister played her much better than I did, maybe because she had a few more years’ experience as her daughter.

“I mean it, Mom,” Rachel said. “I’ll help. I’ll track down Geraldine Frisch. You remember her, my old marketing professor at AU in Geneva. We’ve stayed in touch off and on over the years and I know she helped her sister, who had ALS, process the Swiss legal and medical approvals.”

“Thank you. I’d like that. And speaking of Robert, I invited him here, but I’m glad he couldn’t make it,” Mom said. “He’d start talking like a lawyer, trying to convince me, in his own so eloquent way, that the doctors in this great state in this great country know better than I about my inalienable human rights.”

I laughed through my tears, despite the grim topic. I couldn’t help it. She’d imitated her son’s voice and gestures to a T. She knew him so well. How sad for her, for all of us, that they weren’t closer, weren’t there for each other. I’d have to call him. It was only fair that he knew what our mother’s plan was. Despite her disdain for his logic, I felt he could help me come to terms with her decision … or not.

–  –  –

It was 7:05 am. Time.

Rachel and I lay on either side of our mother, she under the duvet and we on top.

Two staff members from Dignified Dying were present to witness Mom’s death. They set up a long thin metal tripod with a digital recorder to document the procedure for legal liabilities.

I asked Mom, “Is it okay if I get under the covers with you? I want to feel the warmth of your body, end to end, one last time.”

“I thought you’d never ask,” she replied, with an ear-to-ear smile that crinkled her eyes.

“Me, too,” Rachel said, and we both removed our shoes, stood up, lifted our side of the comforter, and slid underneath. I mused for a moment then got up, took off every stitch of my clothes, and repositioned myself underneath the covers again, under Mom’s left arm, my tummy to her left side, leg to leg. I didn’t care if the camera was rolling. I wanted to be as close to my mother as I could be. I wasn’t surprised when Rachel followed my lead on the other side.

I cried.  I perspired. I wanted to stop the clock. I wanted this not to be happening. I wanted my mother to change her mind.

One of the assistants handed Mom a liquid emetic to drink so she wouldn’t barf the final drug. While it took effect, Rachel, Mom, and I spent the next thirty minutes whispering about our newest family members, her first great-grandchildren, and about the world she hoped they’d grow up in. I’d thought about recording her final words on my phone, but we all decided to eschew technology at that moment. There was enough of it in the room already.

Then the other assistant had a second glass in hand with 15 grams of powdered pentobarbital dissolved in water. “Would you like a straw, Emily?” she asked in a warm German-accented voice.

“No, thank you.”

“Are you ready?” the assistant asked.

Mom kissed Rachel on the cheek and said, “I love you”, and then me. “And be sure to give Robert my note,” she added. Finally, she looked up and told the woman, “I am now.”

“Will you drink this voluntarily?”

“I will.”

“Here you are, then.”

She drank it all. Took our hands and squeezed them. In a minute her eyes fluttered. In ten more it was over, the camera dismantled. In fifteen more my sister and I left our mother’s side, dressed, and sat with her until her body was taken away.

–  –  –

Rachel and I closed up the apartment and erased the door code per the instructions in the Dignified Dying Guidelines for Family and Friends. We were allowed to stay there a few more days, but the place was like an emotional morgue. We moved to the Hotel Alexander Zurich to await the final package of paperwork along with Mom’s cremains. After we settled in, Rachel called our brother, waking him on purpose at some ungodly hour, and told him it was over. He informed her he’d spoken with Mom before she left for the airport, but we didn’t know whether to believe him or not. It didn’t matter. It didn’t change anything.

The Alexander is in Old Town Zurich, in the German-speaking section of Switzerland, on the banks of the Limmat River, and a five-minute walk from the train station that would take us back to the airport. Our mother wanted her ashes scattered to the winds so, as she put it, “what’s left of me will find many new homes in the universe.” The broad Limmat was perfect for such a mission, so after a late dinner on our final night in the city, Rachel and I packed ourselves a thermos of strong Cabernet and strolled the bridge across from our hotel. Every few steps we’d pause, sip, and discreetly pour a small cup of Mom’s ashes into the rushing water while reciting a memory of her.

“She went out the way she wanted. No fuss. No frills.” I said, poured a cupful of Mom into the river, and sipped.

“She and Dad had such high hopes for Robert, and he fulfilled every one of them. Too bad it didn’t bring lasting happiness for any of them.” Rachel poured a cup.

“She was a better dancer than all of us combined, including Robert. I loved watching her and Dad on the dance floor at our weddings. Their moves. The looks in their eyes. I still miss him. And now I’m missing both of them.” I poured a cup.

“She was the best cook. Potato pancakes. Carrot cake. Lamb couscous.” Rachel poured a cup.

… and so on and so on.

We ran out of ashes before we ran out of memories. But we had one more thing to do while we drank the dregs of our thermos. We sat down on a bench at the end of the bridge and took out a slip of vellum from the unsealed envelope with “ROBERT” printed on its front. She’d left a message for each of us, unsealed, I guess so we could read all the others, so we had. His read:

My dear, dear son,

You will find the things I want you to know, if you care to know them, in the journals I’ve kept off and on for the past sixty years. They are on a shelf under my desk. You can’t miss them.

I have always loved you in my own way, and I know you loved me in yours.

Mother

Back at the hotel, we got a special delivery envelope from the concierge, put the now-sealed vellum inside it, and addressed it to our brother.



BIO

Patricia Ann Bowen is the author of a medical time travel trilogy, a short story collection about people in challenging circumstances, and a serialized beach read. Her short stories have appeared in several anthologies and most recently in Mystery Tribune, Chamber Magazine, Idle Ink, Unlikely Stories, and Commuterlit.com.

She’s taught short story writing, and she leads a critique group of short story writers for the Atlanta Writer’s Club. She divides her time between the burbs in Georgia and at the beach in South Carolina, has four sons, grandkids all over the world, and two cats in the yard. You can connect with her at www.patriciabowen.com







If They Can’t See the Light, Make Them Feel the Heat

by L. L. Babb

 

           John Taylor spent the first hours of Saturday morning the same way he spent every Saturday when it wasn’t raining. At eight he mowed and edged his perfect square of lawn. Between 8:30 and 9 he hunted for signs of the oxalis that threatened a shady corner of the yard. After eradicating any sign of weeds, he decapitated the marigolds in the pots on the porch. Finally, he swept the walkways and stepped back to admire his work. Taylor always liked the way the lawn appeared to have just received a basic training haircut, each blade of grass chewed and standing at attention. He imagined the ravaged marigolds thanking him for his tough love.

            Now he heard the interior of the house begging for its weekly beating—the carpets, the toilets, the sheets and towels—all in a chorus. He would get to them in due time.

            He went inside, sat down on the couch, tipped his head back on the cushions, and closed his eyes. To be clear, this was not a nap. John Taylor did not take naps. Naps were for children or the elderly and though nearly sixty, Taylor did not consider himself either. He was simply going to sit for one moment before he continued his chores. A breeze puffed through the living room window blowing in curtains as sheer as tissue paper. The next-door neighbor was trimming his hedge with electric clippers. Taylor listened to the sound of the metal teeth gnawing through the branches, the drone rising and falling.

            He dreamed he was on his favorite forklift lifting an oddly shaped box and fitting it like a puzzle piece into an oddly shaped slot on a shelf high above his head. At the edge of his vision, he saw his ex-wife flitting down the warehouse aisle towards him. She was barefoot and bare-legged, the puddling white skin of her midsection draped in gauzy, multi-colored scarves. Taylor shut off his forklift. He felt a familiar bubble of exasperation rise in his throat. What did she think she was doing coming to his place of business dressed like this? He instinctively realized that this nonsense–her dancing and twirling, this loopy exhibitionism–was the result of their divorce. Without his steadying influence, she’d gone off the deep end as he always feared she would. He reached out to grab her arm but she skipped away from him, brushing his face with the trailing scarves, a filmy gauntlet thrown down, then she disappeared around the end of the aisle towards the shipping/receiving dock. Taylor sighed and trudged after her. He considered calling her name but he barely dared acknowledge that he knew her. At the same time, he felt a profound ache behind his sternum, an unwelcome joy at the sight of her.

            The doorbell rang. Taylor fought off the curtains blowing in over his face and struggled awake. He had a fleeting thought as the dream dissolved around him that it might be Emily at the door. He massaged his chest for a second as if trying to manipulate his heart.

            The doorbell sounded again. “Just a minute, just a minute,” Taylor said.

            A young man stood on the front step. At first Taylor thought it might be one of those school kids selling overpriced candy but noticed that this guy had a serious five o’clock shadow. Taylor couldn’t tell the difference between teenagers and adults anymore. Heck, sometimes couldn’t tell the difference between men and women. This fellow wore baggy shorts and a tee shirt proclaiming “ORGASM DONOR.” His baseball cap was on backwards but Taylor could see the shaved head underneath. Taylor disapproved of shaved heads on young men.

            “Hi,” the young man said. “I’m your neighbor in the house behind you.” He nodded his head, took a step back, and said, “Lance.”

            “Taylor,” he said. He didn’t offer his hand to the guy. What kind of person wore a shirt like that in front of a stranger? In front of anyone?

            “My wife and I bought the place a couple of months ago.” Lance shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “You know that storm that knocked out the electricity for a couple of days? That’s the weekend we moved in. Lousy timing but it wasn’t like we had any choice. I mean, when you give your notice at one place and escrow closes on the other, you gotta go when you gotta go. You know what I mean?”

            “No,” Taylor said, bristling at the phrase “you gotta.” The divorce lawyer Taylor had hired and who had threatened to pull representation (and keep the hefty retainer) each time Taylor refused to relinquish one more thing to his wife, said “you gotta” a lot.

            “Okay,” the young man said. “Well, the back fence between our yards is falling down.”

            Taylor hesitated. He hadn’t been in his backyard in over a year. It had been Emily’s special place the way the garage was his. She had loved gardening. She crammed in wrought iron benches, a birdbath, hummingbird feeders, gates and gnomes and trellised arches. She had one bed of flowers planted exclusively to attract butterflies, another for cut flowers. Center stage in the middle of all this chaos was four topiary bushes Emily had been training to look like a family of giant, knee-high squirrels. She wasted a lot of time with those squirrels, clipping them, talking to them like they were her children. Perhaps they were, in a way. Taylor and Emily had met and married in their mid-forties, too late to start a family. Which was fine with Taylor. He didn’t really care for kids. They were disruptive and destructive.

            He hated the fussy, high-maintenance plants that Emily had chosen for her garden. It was just like her to find the messiest trees and flowers. Camellias fell off the bush and covered the ground like a bunch of soggy debutants the morning after a ball. A droopy Japanese tree dropped millions of curled, green leaves the size of fingernail clippings. The topiary squirrels grew together into a conspiratorial huddle that Taylor felt uncomfortable turning his back on.

            When the divorce was final, after he had to give Emily money for half of his own house, Taylor rented a tractor. He tore everything out of the backyard, smoothed down the dirt, and filled the yard from fence line to fence line with concrete. While he was doing it—hacking down the delicate Japanese maple, tipping over the birdbath, attacking those damn squirrels with a chainsaw—he felt a surge of righteous vengeance. But shortly after the concrete had set, all the anger just rushed out of him. He was overcome with a combination of shame and fear, as if something deep inside of him had been yanked out and exposed, unfurling and flapping like a banner that proclaimed his true, small self.

            Now as Taylor led the neighbor down the front steps and along the narrow side yard, it was as if a strong current was pushing him from behind. He felt his face getting hot. There was nothing to be ashamed of, he told himself. He could do whatever he wanted with his damn yard. He didn’t need to justify anything to anyone.  

            Lance didn’t appear to notice the flat grey moonscape. The fence was indeed falling down. Two eight-foot sections leaned over into Taylor’s yard, the dog-eared planks gaping. Taylor reached down and grabbed the top of the fence and tried to push it back upright, as if the problem were merely a matter of balance. The top of the board broke off in a splintery chunk in Taylor’s hand.

            Lance let out a low whistle of astonishment. “Man, that fence is toast.”

            “Now, let’s not jump to conclusions,” Taylor said, annoyed. He had lived with this fence for twenty years. What right did this guy have to judge? Taylor could see over the leaning fence into Lance’s yard. There was a new deck, a table with chairs and an umbrella, and a complicated-looking stainless-steel barbeque. Terra cotta pots overflowing with impatiens were arranged across the yard in orchestrated casualness. He turned to look at his own yard. His house rose like a stucco battleship looming over a sea of concrete.

            “I called a guy I know.” Lance pulled a folded slip of paper from his shorts pocket. “New redwood planks, posts, labor, everything comes to $2,500.00. That’s $1,250.00 apiece.”

            Taylor studied the fence, hackles rising. It wasn’t the money that bothered him so much as the principle. Emily used to ambush him like this when she wanted something. She’d start out sweet, let’s just have a look-see, merely window shopping, not really in the market today and then the next thing he knew she’d be raising her voice, waving Consumer Reports, enlisting some slime-ball salesman to bolster her case. “What principle?” Emily would say. “What possible principle could you hold relating to—” and here Taylor could fill in the blank. A better dishwasher. A set of dinner dishes that matched. Refinishing the hardwood floors.

            The sliding glass door to Lance’s house slid open and an attractive woman picked her way along the new deck and across a zig-zagging line of stepping stones. A pink sweater hung from her shoulders, the sleeves tied around her neck. When she got to the fence, she smiled at Taylor. “Hi,” she said, with a quick wave of her hand. “I’m Avril,” a name that Taylor judged as simultaneously odd yet familiar, like the kind of name they gave to new cars.

            “John Taylor,” Taylor said, nodding his head.

            “How’s it going out here?” she asked. “Have we got everything all worked out? Honey, did you show him your research? The estimate we received? If you write out a check today, Lance can call someone this afternoon. I really need to have this fence repaired by next weekend.”

            Apparently, Taylor had been dealing with a subordinate. Now that his wife was there, Lance stared at his feet. Lance was obviously the kind of guy who had to be prodded into doing the simplest of tasks. It was sad what young women were settling for these days. Taylor had been a great husband. He always took care of the important issues—Emily hadn’t had to worry about a thing. Taylor imagined she was kicking herself for divorcing him. She had squandered him away like an unearned inheritance.

            Taylor watched the wife’s eyes flicker over his own bare yard. He wanted to tell her that he was better than his backyard, she should come around to the front porch, have a glass of ice tea. Instead, he heard himself say, “Actually, I think I’ve got everything we need to…fix the… ” He lost the will to continue halfway through then forced himself to push forward, “…the fence…in my garage.” What Taylor had in his garage was a pegboard of gleaming power tools that he didn’t like to get dirty, each one outlined with a black sharpie so that Taylor could tell at a glance if something was missing, a half bag of quick setting cement, and a jar of recycled nails that he had pulled from some old pallets he was going to use for firewood.

            “Really?” the wife said. “Why, that would be fantastic, wouldn’t it, Lance?” She gazed at Taylor with such grateful admiration that he was afraid he might blush.

            “Well, sure,” Taylor said. What was he doing? It was as if he had been bewitched by this woman whose name he had already forgotten. Sally? Abby? Aspirin? Aspirin couldn’t be right. He ho-hoed, continuing helplessly. “With Lance’s assistance, we can bang this out tomorrow.”

            “What? I was going to watch football,” Lance whined. “I’m not good at this stuff. We need to hire someone.”

            “You’re not good at it because you never try,” Mrs. Lance said. “I think this is just wonderful. I’m always in favor of saving money.” She turned towards Taylor and cocked her head conspiratorially. “Lance might learn a few things.”

            Taylor felt buoyant with benevolence. He had once felt this way with his ex-wife. How Emily had looked up to him when they first started dating! Emily had been, in Taylor’s opinion, a mess—expired tags on her car, no health insurance, a lukewarm credit score. She took his coat the first time she invited him over to her apartment and threw it over a pyramid of clothes on the living room couch. Plastic garbage bags full of recycling leaned three-deep against the cabinet doors in the kitchen. She was 46 and had a brand-new tattoo of Marvin the Martin peeking over the top of her tank top, right over her left breast. She wasn’t his type at all but after that night in her apartment, when Taylor offered to take the black bags of cans and bottles to the recycling center downtown, Emily had gazed at him with such gratitude it made his heart full. He had believed he could make her happy with so little effort. Looking back, he thought he must have lost his mind.

            Sunday morning, Taylor filled a wheelbarrow—two hammers, a trowel, a saw, the bag of cement, and a plastic bucket to mix the cement in. He had slipped off to the hardware store when it opened at seven and bought two lengths of pressure treated wood. The neighbors didn’t need to know that he did not, in fact, have everything in his garage to fix the fence. He tucked the receipt in his shirt pocket.

            He was pulling nails and taking down the old planks when Lance showed up on his side of the fence at 10 am. “What’s the plan, man?” Lance asked. He held a paper cup from one of the new coffee shops on the main street of town, the one jam-packed with people gazing at their cell phones. He probably had paid more than $5.00 for a cup of coffee. Taylor wondered if Lance’s wife approved of that kind of nonsense.

            “Most of the boards are fine.” Earlier, Taylor had determined that the rot was confined primarily to the edges of each board. The centers were good, solid redwood. A little green in places, a bit unsightly, but still strong. “We’ll trim the rotten parts and reuse these.”

            Lance looked at him with the blank face of a straight man waiting for the punch line. He took a sip of his coffee. “Then the fence would only be about four feet high. We will see right over the top of it.”

            “Well, I wasn’t finished,” Taylor said. “We’re going to nail these two-by-twelves along the bottom and use the existing boards for the top. Not a problem.”

            “I dunno, that sounds kind of janky to me,” Lance said. “Half of the fence will be horizontal and the rest of the planks vertical? Dude, I can’t even picture what you are talking about.” He pursed his lips and sucked at the lid of his coffee. Taylor wanted to smack him.

            “You got a better idea?”

            “Oh, I had a much better idea but you shot it down yesterday.”

            “Right,” Taylor said. He grabbed the bucket and the bag of cement. “When you’re done moaning, you can pull off the rest of the boards.”

            The job took all day. The quick setting cement was not as quick as Taylor remembered and the salvaged boards were more damaged than he first thought. By the end of the afternoon, when Taylor stepped back to judge the finished project, the result looked more like someone’s patchwork quilt hanging on a clothesline than it did a fence. Boards went horizontally and vertically, and up towards the top corners, there were spots where Taylor had hammered on small pieces of wood that overlapped crazily like some kind of collage.

            “Hoo boy,” Lance called over from his yard. “This is some piece of shit.” Mid-afternoon, Lance had switched from coffee to beer. When Taylor peered over the top of the fence, Lance waggled a can at him. “I don’t want to be around when Avril gets home and gets a load of this.”

            Taylor hefted his hammer in his hand, trying to store AVRIL in a readily accessible corner of his brain. She appeared to be the kind of person who appreciated frugality and functionality. So what if it wasn’t a work of art? It was a fence. She would be pleased with the work and the money saved. She could plant a tree or a bush in front of the parts she didn’t like.

            “I’ll drop a note by with your share of the expenses,” Taylor said, filling his wheelbarrow with his tools.

            The following evening after work, Taylor sat down at the kitchen table and itemized the cost of the repairs. He wrote down the amount he had paid for the wood then estimated the cost of the cement and the nails in his jelly jar. Bent or not, they had used every last one of them and they would need to be replaced. He adjusted the half bag of cement for inflation since it was several years old and the price had surely increased since he bought it. He estimated the hours he’d spent pulling and straightening the used nails from the old pallet plus the time he had actually spent repairing the fence, and multiplied that by his hourly rate at work. He thought about adding a rental fee for the wheelbarrow and the bucket but dismissed that idea.

            He got up and filled a glass of water from the tap. Should he really charge for pulling the nails? He would have done that whether the fence needed fixing or not. He sat back down and crossed it off the list. He thought about …Advil…looking at the list. He took out the inflation for the bag of cement. It still looked so petty, $12 for this, $48 for that. He removed his hourly pay. He crumpled up the paper and wrote down a flat amount. Then he halved it. Advil would shake her head in wonder. She would be amazed that someone could do such a fine job for such a small amount of money. She was the kind of neighbor he thought he might be friends with. He might even get used to Lance. Teach him stuff. He halved the number once more. $17.50. It was a ridiculously low figure and Taylor was tempted to adjust it up a little, just to make it more believable, then stopped himself. Advil would understand that this was a gift.

            And honestly, he didn’t want anything but her appreciation. And the $17.50.

            Taylor wrote the amount on a new piece of paper with “Fence Repair” and a smiley face next to it. He had never used a smiley face before but he felt this was a situation that warranted it. They were neighbors. Friendly. Taylor put the paper in an envelope and took a stroll around the block to leave the note in the Lance’s mailbox.

            He half expected the money to be in his own mailbox when he got home on Tuesday evening but it wasn’t. What had he been thinking? They couldn’t very well leave cash in his mailbox. Perhaps they planned to walk over later. He watched television that night well past his regular bedtime, leaving the porchlight on so they could see he was awake and available.

            Wednesday night, Taylor wrote the figure on another piece of paper, minus the smiley face, and signed his name at the bottom. “Your neighbor, John Taylor.” Now they had a choice of dropping by the cash or a check. This time he took the note to the front door in case it had gotten lost in the mailbox the first time. He thought he could hear voices when he knocked but no one answered. He slipped the note under the door.

            By Friday evening, he still hadn’t heard from the Lances. Taylor went out into the backyard to check on the fence. Perhaps it had fallen down again. Maybe something else was wrong. Maybe one of them had gotten sick or been in a car accident. In the grey light of the moon the fence looked as formidable as the face of a cliff, complete with outcroppings and toe holds.

             Taylor heard the back door to the Lance’s house slide open with a groan. Now he could hear people in their yard, voices and laughter and something else, ice rattling inside a plastic cooler. A champagne cork, a pop, more laughter. He reached up and grabbed the top of the fence to peek over. It felt sturdy, thicker than he remembered. Was there something propped up against it on their side? He couldn’t tell in the dark. He went back and got his stepladder from the garage, unfolded it against the fence, and stood on the first rung. Yes, there was something there, a solid piece of redwood against the fence that he had built. He climbed the second rung and peered down. Another piece of wood next to that—a whole row of dog-eared planks, screwed in and freshly stained, supported by the fence he had sweated over and paid for.

            It took Taylor’s breath away. The disrespect. The audacity of it.

            There was Lance holding court at his sissy barbeque, swinging a beer in the air, flanked by a couple of guys just like him. A trio of t-shirt wearing, baseball-hatted imbeciles. There were strands of white Christmas lights hung from the house, crisscrossing back and forth over the deck. Lance waggled his spatula in the air—king of his backyard. That little shit. Advil floated out of the house as if on wings, carrying a plate in one hand, shoulder high, stopping by one seated woman, dipping her head to listen, to nod, laugh.

            Taylor ducked down, crouching on the step ladder. They were having a party! They had used his fence to make a better fence and now they were having a party. They owed him money and instead of paying him for his time and his materials and his knowledge and the use of his tools, they had given money to someone else to make his fence look better and they were having a party that he had not been invited to. Did they think he wouldn’t notice? Were they deliberately having a party to mock him? A man laughed and Lance tittered and Taylor knew that Lance was probably telling everyone about the fence and the money and how they had used him, taken him for a fool. Because he was a fool. An old fool.

            Wasn’t this always what happened when you tried to help someone? Wasn’t this the story of his life? What did Emily do as soon as Taylor had gotten her affairs all straightened out? After he’d given her his good name, shared his outstanding credit score, put her on his car insurance with his good driving discount, rendered unto her his knowledge and expertise and guidance? She’d left him, of course, left him flat. And what had he gotten out of that marriage? Nothing. No, hell, less than nothing. He’d lost money, lost time, almost lost his home.

            Taylor folded up his stepping stool and brought it back to the garage, placing it carefully in its usual spot. Later, he would acknowledge, if only to himself, that this was the moment when the trajectory of the evening might have gone a different way. It was hard to see those particular moments when standing in the middle of a lifetime. The thought of being able to forget it, to just let it go, nudged at a corner of his mind, but quickly disappeared. He reached for the six neatly bundled stacks of newspapers sitting on the recycle bin. He loaded the newspapers into the wheelbarrow and added the pieces of broken-down pallets he had carefully pulled the nails from. As he propped the pallet pieces on top of the newspapers to make teepees against the fence, he heard the party pitching up. Lance was singing.

            This was his fence. He could do anything he wanted with his own fence. They hadn’t paid one dime for it.

            He went into the kitchen, retrieved a pack of matches from the junk drawer, and grabbed the full gas can as he passed through the garage again. He doused the newspapers with the gasoline, emptying the can. He lit a match, and touched the flame to the paper. It caught then fizzled and Taylor was in the process of striking another match when there was a whoosh that pulled the air out of his lungs. The newspapers, drenched with gasoline, the rotten wood, and the stain-soaked redwood planks, ignited into a wall of orange and blue flames ten feet high. A woman screamed. Someone shouted. Taylor was driven back to the wall of his house.

            Taylor could only cower and shield his eyes from the bright light. The singeing heat, the acrid smell of chemicals, and a deafening roar consumed the night sky. Shadows danced over the concrete making Taylor’s backyard look alive. In the spot where the Japanese maple had been, a tiny eddy of black smoke rose up and reached wispy tendrils towards him like a ghost beckoning. He remembered planting that tree, its new branches and leaves wrapped in a burlap turban, Emily watching as he dug the hole. That had been a fine day in early spring. Emily feared that the sun might burn the new growth so Taylor brought out a beach umbrella to protect the tree after it was in the ground. He and Emily gazed down at the pathetic thing, its thin trunk quivering. Without him, the tree would have died that first year. Now it was gone forever. Wasn’t that the way of everything you cared about?

            It was raining. Or no, someone on the other side of the fence was spraying water. Lance must be using the garden hose. It would never occur to Lance that the fresh redwood stain on their side of the fence was oil based. “You’re making it worse, you idiot,” Taylor called. In the distance, he could hear sirens and he thought he might go back inside and let someone else take over. Why did he always have to be the one to fix everything?

            He felt a massive weight pressing down on him, so heavy and unrelenting that it was hard to get to his feet. This was his burden—all this great knowledge, his common sense, the resolve to do things the right way versus the wrong way, his sense of duty. Wearily, he headed back to the garage to get the fire extinguisher from its place on the pegboard. He didn’t want to use it. He’d have to pay to replace it once it was activated. He was always the one to pay, he thought. Always.



BIO



L. L. Babb has been a teacher for the Writers Studio San Francisco and on-line since 2008. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming at the Peatsmoke Journal, Cleaver, the San Francisco Chronicle, the MacGuffin, Good Life Review, and elsewhere. She received a special mention in the 2022 Pushcart anthology for her short story, “Where Have You Been All Your Life.” Lorraine lives deep among the trees of Forestville, CA, with her husband Cornbaby Johnson, dog Smudge, and cat Cosmo.







Free Termite Inspections

by Hillary Tiefer



            During the time when the landline telephone was a powerful money-making tool, I took a job working at Burbank Pest & Termite Control as a telemarketer. I must’ve frowned after the woman at the temp agency defined my duties because she pointed out that my lack of secretarial skills made me qualified for little else. I needed the money and assured myself this job was only for the summer. In the fall I’d be starting a Master’s program in English at UCLA.

            On the Monday morning after Independence Day, I parked my Chevy Impala a block away from the office on Burbank Boulevard. It was in a squat brick building with a dirty and empty display window. My mother had told me it used to be a dress shop.

            When I opened the door and entered, a man in his thirties greeted me, offering his hand for me to shake. “Hi, I’m Gary,” he said. He wore a well-ironed button-down shirt tucked into slacks—the type of clothes my father used to wear to work as an accountant.

            “I’m Ellen,” I said, keeping it on a first name basis.

            He pointed to his partners sitting behind desks, both also looking to be in their thirties. They were more casually dressed in t-shirts and jeans. Gary introduced me first to Hank, who was heavyset and had an Elvis Presley’s hairstyle, with brown sideburns that swooped toward his chin. He gave me a nod. The other he introduced as Roger, who was roughly handsome with stubble on his cheeks and a rusty tan. He smiled at me and said, “Nice to know you, Ellen.”

            Soon a girl arrived who announced she was ready to make calls. She had stringy blond hair and wore a tie-dyed t-shirt over bell bottom jeans. I, on the other hand, wore my most conservative clothes: a pink jersey top over white linen pants, not quite so flared on the bottom. White probably wasn’t a wise choice for this place.

            “Let me introduce you both,” Gary said, “You’re on the same team.” He pointed at each of us and said, “Ellen, Sally.”

            The girl grinned at me. I noted that she was about my age, in her twenties. I assumed she, like me, was only here for the summer and in the fall would pursue a more promising profession.

            “I want you both to know your job is a vital one and we’re depending on you,” Gary said as if he were the coach of a football team—we were teammates, after all. “As telemarketers,you girls are going to contribute to making this firm a success. In other words, me and my partners expect you both to make us rich. There are plenty of termites in San Fernando Valley and we aim to destroy all of them. We are very excited about our summer campaign. We expect you to put out a big effort.”

            Gary brought us to a small, dusty back room, which probably had been the storage room for the dress shop. On each end of a long table, which occupied most of the space, were a phone, thick phonebook, pad of paper, and pile of Bic pens. In a corner of the room was a tall pedestal fan, which he turned on.

            “Have a seat, girls,” he said. “Sally, you’re responsible for last names A to M and, Ellen, N to Z. Just call homes, no apartments or businesses. When they answer you tell them you’re with Burbank Pest & Termite Control and you’re offering a free termite inspection. Spice it up, of course. Remind them how important this is and what a great deal we’re offering—inspections are costly. If they agree, write down their name and number and tell them a man will call them soon with details. It’s simple as pie. Best of luck—we’re counting on you two.”

            He was about to leave but then stopped and said, “Unfortunately the plumbing isn’t working in the office bathroom. But all you have to do is go out the back door and enter Hank and Margie’s trailer. It’s okay to use theirs.”

            “I’ll show Ellen,” Sally said, obviously familiar with the place.

            He gave her a nod and left.

            “I can’t just barge into their house to use their bathroom,” I said.

            Sally let out a giggle. “They don’t care. I’m best buddies with Margie and I know she’s very laid back. Anyway, she’s gone a lot and so is her kid, Billy.”

            “You know everyone who works here?”

            “Mostly. Margie went to school with my sister, Carol. They used to hang out with each other all the time before Margie got pregnant and married Hank. They introduced me to Gary and his wife, Claire. I was so excited when this job opened up.” Then she grinned and her small hazel eyes sparkled. “I plan on getting friendly with Roger. He’s some hunk. He makes my heart go all crazy with flutters. Margie told me he’s available—he recently got divorced.”

            “Isn’t he too old for you?” I dared ask.

            “Not at all. I like older guys. In my opinion they’re sexier than younger guys.”

            I looked down to the closed telephone book and knew I had to open it. “It’s been nice talking to you but I guess we should get started.”

            She grinned. “I’m going to snag plenty of A’s today.”

            That word snag made me wince but I wished I had at least half of her enthusiasm for this job.

            I opened the phonebook to the beginning of the N’s and saw the last name Nader. As I began dialing, I viewed this person as more like a victim than a potential customer. I was relieved when no one answered. But the next one did, a woman who sounded out of breath. I began my short pitch about the free termite inspection.

            “Termite inspection! Is that the reason I ran out of the shower, soaking wet with only a towel around me? Damn you!” Then click.

            I looked toward Sally. She was happily writing on her pad.

            I had a few more calls, some angry, some polite but no one interested in a termite inspection.

            The time arrived for me to have to use the bathroom. I waited for Sally to finish her call then I followed her to the back door. She opened it and pointed to a trailer about ten feet away. I thanked her and crossed a path of crabgrass to the trailer.

            The main door was open—someone was home. I tapped on the screen door. A woman soon arrived and opened it for me. “Come on in,” she said. “I’m Margie.” She had platinum hair teased into a slope and wore thick black eye makeup, fake eyelashes, and glossy pink lipstick. She was plump but apparently had no qualms about revealing her arms in a sleeveless blouse and her legs in a denim miniskirt.

            “Hi, I’m Ellen. I’m the new telemarketer. I’m sorry to have to use your bathroom.”

            “Hey, no problem at all. Excuse the mess. I haven’t had time to clean up.” She pointed to a door in a hallway. “That’s the bathroom.” She placed a strap of her handbag over her shoulder. “I gotta run.” The screen door snapped shut behind her.

            The small living room and adjoining kitchen were appallingly messy. Dirty dishes were stacked in the sink. Crushed beer and soda cans lay sideways on a coffee table and a glass ashtray was piled high with cigarette butts. The room stank of cigarettes and rotting food, no doubt from the trash bag sitting on the kitchen counter. A man’s t-shirt was crumpled on an upholstered armchair near a television on a metal stand and by the chair was a pair of woman’s flipflops.

            I never let the apartment I shared with my boyfriend, Adam, get like this. Adam wasn’t as concerned about neatness as I was but he washed his dishes and tossed his laundry in a hamper. I wished he did more of his share of vacuuming and dusting but between his work at Bank of America and his rigorous studying of the law I couldn’t expect him to do much. This domestic job was mostly mine. It was the one trait my mother instilled in me. She was obsessive about cleanliness. Every time I visited her the house smelled of ammonia cleanser and every surface of furniture had a polished glean. Yet it seemed more like a set than a home since my father died, my brother, Jerry, moved to Illinois with his wife, and I left to join Adam in his apartment.

            No one ever bothered to clean this trailer. I had to brace myself for the bathroom.

            I entered and told myself to get my necessary function over with quickly. While I sat on the commode I faced a small table with a pile of Playboy magazines. The one on top was open to the centerfold. A nude blond-haired “bunny” lay sprawling before me. She had huge boobs—way bigger than mine. Thoughts about why it was so strategically placed there troubled me. I wanted to close the magazine but dared not touch it. I looked away, down to the grimy linoleum floor.

            At our noon lunch break, I ate my peanut butter and jelly sandwich and drank my Tab sitting by a round metal table shaded by a limp oak. It was across from the trailer and near a barbecue grill. After I finished eating, I removed my paperback copy of King Lear from my satchel. I was captivated by Shakespeare and probably would have pursued scholarship about the famous author had not so many others did so already. I opened to the page where I had placed a bookmark and read King Lear rant in the storm, “Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal….” I stopped when I noticed Sally strutting toward me. She was sipping from a can of Coors.

            “Here you are,” she said. “I was looking for you.” She sat on a metal lawn chair next to mine. “What are you reading?”

            “King Lear. It’s very tragic but I’m loving it.”

            “I’m not into reading,” she said and sipped her beer. “I want to live my life and not spend my time reading about somebody else’s. So tell me about yourself, Ellen. You got a boyfriend?”

            “Yes, I do.”

            “Is it serious?”

            “Yes, we live together and when the time is right we’ll get engaged.”

            “That’s cool. I wish I had a boyfriend I could live with instead of with my mom and my stepdad who’s drunk most of the time. I dream of moving in with Roger. Of course we have to go on a date first. What do you both do for fun besides the obvious?”

            “Not much this summer. Adam is busy as a courier for Bank of America and also preparing for law school in the fall.”

            “Gee, that’s too bad. Everyone needs fun. You can always leave him home and join me and my friends on a Friday night. We hang out at Joey’s Saloon, about a mile up the boulevard. Sometimes guys pick us up. But you can stick around the bar if you’re so faithful to your boyfriend.”

            “Thanks for offering, but I’m also busy preparing for school. I’ll be in a Master’s program in English in the fall. It’ll be challenging.”

            She slowly shook her head. “I hated English. But I like sales. And I’m good at it.” She clapped her hands to applaud herself. “I grabbed two customers this morning. That’s darn good for making cold calls—from what I’ve been told. Of course, I heard my share of cussing—worse than what my stepdad says.” She sipped her beer.

            “I did too and I didn’t get anyone interested yet. Gary won’t like that.”

            She popped up. “Well, come on, girl. You’ve got to be pushier. Don’t take no for an answer.”

            After my first two phone calls with typically enraged people cursing at me and slamming down the phone, I heard a sweet but shaky voice answer, “Hello.” It was a woman who sounded like my grandmother, which meant she was probably in her eighties.

            I proceeded to recite my lines about a free termite inspection.

            “It’s so nice of you to call,” the woman said. “My name is Peggy. What’s yours, dear?”

            “Ellen.” I wanted to tell this sweet grandmotherly type she probably didn’t need the termite inspection and say good-by but the zealous worker, Sally, could overhear me and get me fired. I forced myself to say, “So, are you interested in the inspection?”

            “I suppose that’s a good idea. My husband, Bert, used to take care of the bugs but he passed away—it’s been three years now. I miss Bert. You would like him if you knew him. Everyone liked him.”

            “Yes, I’m sure I would.” I lowered my voice and said, “So maybe you don’t need a —-.”

            “You say the inspection is free?”

            “Yes, but —-.”

            “You sound like my granddaughter, Jennifer. I don’t see her much. She and my son and daughter-in-law live in Tustin. They don’t visit too often. Seems the traffic is getting so bad it’s tough for them to make the trip. It was back in February when I saw them last. Jennifer is a pretty girl and her brother, Brian, is a real cute boy. He loves to do all kinds of leaps on his skateboard. I’m afraid one of these days he’ll injure himself.”

            I was listening to her while my mind drifted away from the purpose of my call. Finally, it dawned on me to say, “I don’t suppose you want a —-.”

            “Oh, yes. It would be lovely to have that inspection. When will you come?”

            I asked for her full name and phone number and told her a man would return her call.

            “That’s wonderful,” she said. “I look forward to it.”

            I looked down at her name that I had scribbled on my pad. Peggy Nelson would be happy to get a phone call—any phone call and a visit from anyone. I felt no triumph.

***

            At five p.m. I left feeling weary from my work. I had had success twice on this day. Besides Peggy, a woman had said she was planning to sell her house in the near future so it was best to get the “termite issue over with”—as she had put it. Sally was grinning ear to ear as she followed me out the front door. She boasted having four “bites” that day.

            I decided to visit my mother before heading to our apartment in Van Nuys. Peggy triggered guilt in me. My mother often invited Adam and me to visit or for me to meet her for lunch or coffee and I usually came up with an excuse not to accept. The truth was I didn’t enjoy my mother’s company. I headed for North Hollywood, where she lived.

            I drove on a street I knew well, of modest houses with neatly mowed lawns, agapanthus shrubs, and skinny palm trees. I turned my Impala into the driveway of a beige stucco house with a red tile roof—what had been my home for years. I had grown up on this street. All of the neighborhood kids I knew had dispersed. Even Bobby, the boy who mowed our lawn for years, was gone, a soldier fighting in Vietnam. But most of their parents remained together living here and enjoying retirement. My father died in his early sixties of a stroke and now my mother lived alone in our house and depended on his life insurance.

            I opened the front door and shouted, “Mom, it’s me, Ellen.”

            She rushed in from the kitchen. She had put on weight since I had seen her last—just a few weeks earlier. I was afraid she spent most of her day cooking and eating. Her hair was different: from a wedge cut, dyed brown, to a tight perm and brassy orange. She saw me staring at her hair and slipped her fingers through the curls. “I know it’s different,” she said. “I felt I needed a change. Anyway, my beautician told me dark hair doesn’t look good on a woman when she gets older. It drains out the complexion. Besides, I decided if you can have lovely red hair so can I.” She cocked her head at me. “If I knew you were coming, I’d have made brisket—your favorite.”

            “I can’t stay for dinner. I thought I’d just drop by after work to say a quick hello.”

            “It’s been a while. Can you stay long enough for a cup of coffee? I made a bundt cake that’s delicious.”

            I wanted to tell her that she was baking too many cakes but restrained myself. Instead, I said, “Okay, sure.” I followed her into the kitchen. I sat on one of the four vinyl chairs with a green leaf pattern by the table with a faux marble top, where I had sat for years. I got a whiff of garlic and sauce bubbling from a pot on the stove.

            “I was in the mood for spaghetti and meatballs tonight,” my mother said. “Too bad you can’t stay.”

            I feared she ate too much spaghetti but I again restrained myself from saying that. “Thanks, but we have plenty of leftovers from the dinner I made last night. We don’t want them to go to waste.” That was a lie: like most evenings Adam and I made our separate dinners, with no leftovers, but we at least tried to eat together.

            “How’s your new job?” she asked while scooping coffee into the metal percolator basket.

            “Awful,” I said and brought a forkful of her bundt cake to my mouth. It was delicious and I was hungry.

            “You told me it has something to do with termite inspections. I can’t see you going to houses spraying poison.”

            I shook my head emphatically. “That’s not my job. I sit in an office and call people from a phonebook. I ask them if they want a free termite inspection.”

            “Calling people on a phone—I don’t like that at all,” she said. “I hang up on those people immediately. I resent them making me come to the phone and then trying to sell me something.”

            I thought about all the profanity hurled at me during the day and some were imaginative. “Yes, many hang up—and worse.”

            “Why do it then? It can’t bring in many sales.”

            “Actually, it does. And just one fumigation of a large house can cost a thousand dollars. Today a woman agreed to an inspection because she’s selling her house and another woman also wanted it.” I’d not say that this woman had wanted to hear a voice, wanted to see a face, wanted some company in her life. This could also be my mother. “Mom, don’t you think this house is too big to live in all alone? You should consider selling it. You’d probably like an apartment that has a swimming pool, where you can make friends.”

            She pouted. “I don’t want to give up this house, where we lived for so many years. Besides, the mortgage is paid off. And I do have friends—my mah jongg friends and my friends from Temple Adat Ari El. I recently joined the sisterhood, and we’ll be getting together soon to discuss a project for next Rosh Hashanah.”

            “I’m glad to hear it.”

            “It’s you I worry about,” she said as she poured coffee into a cup. She handed me the cup and a pint-sized container of half and half. “I hate to think of you doing a job like that.”

            “I tell myself it’s temporary,” I said and sipped the coffee. I relished it and hoped it would perk me up.

            She sat across from me and stared at me while frowning. She made no effort to lift her cup to drink. “I don’t like to butt in, sweetheart, but I think you should quit and get a better job, one you really like and, well, maybe want to keep for a while.”

            I forced myself to place my cup down gently. I knew what she meant and was furious. “I intend to go to grad school in the fall.”

            She grimaced. “That’ll be quite an expense. I wish I could help to pay for the tuition but being a widow without an income isn’t easy.”

            “I told you I have loans and I’m in a work-study program.”

            “Yes, but it will be so hard for you and Adam. If you got a decent job—after all you already have a college degree—you could marry earlier and in time Adam will finish law school. You’ll both be on Easy Street and you might even decide to start a family.”

            I shot up. “I intend to teach college English and that means I go to grad school!”

            She shrugged. “If that’s what you want. I hope you manage it.”

            I lifted my satchel. “I’m leaving.”

            As I bounded toward my car, I decided I’d not visit my mother again for a long time, maybe even months.

            When I entered our apartment, Adam was in the kitchen area next to the living room, opening a cardboard pizza box. He looked up at me. He was handsome with coffee brown hair and turquoise-blue eyes but now his upper lip curved into a snarl, making him look less appealing. “I had a shitty day so I decided to treat us to a pizza for dinner,” he said.

            “Great idea,” I said and dropped my satchel on the living room carpet and went to the refrigerator to retrieve sodas for the two of us. “Mine wasn’t so great either. I hated having to make calls to —-.”

            “I still can’t believe what happened,” he said, while lifting a piece of pizza dripping with cheese. “When I opened the van door a bag stuffed with peoples’ checks fell out and straight into the sewer. There was no way I could get the bag out of there so I had to report it to Pete. Some sewer guys had to go out there and get it. Pete was pissed.”

            “That’s awful,” I said realizing his day was worse than mine. “Let’s go sit at the table.”

            “Yeah, and tonight I’ve got to hit the books.” He slumped into a wobbly oak chair. “I hope I can stay focused.”

            “We need a break,” I said. Sally’s words came to mind. “On Saturday we should head out to Zuma Beach. It’s been a long time since we’ve gone to the beach—or anywhere for that matter.”

            “When do we really have time for a break, Ellen?” He bit into his pizza and while still chewing, he added, “Tort law is hell. I don’t know how I’ll remember any of it. I’ll be booted out the first year if I don’t get a handle on it.”

            This was Adam’s great fear. He had told me many times about the attrition rate for first year law students.

            One slice of the pizza was enough for me. I lifted my plate and headed to the sink. I was rinsing it when I felt nibble-like kisses on the back of my neck. Then Adam’s arms wrapped around my waist. “We manage to have fun right here in the apartment, don’t we?” he said by my ear.

            “Yes, we do,” I said softly.

***

            The following Friday, around four thirty Gary came into our back room and said, “Finish your last calls, girls, and come into the front office.”

            I had just finished a call with an irate woman who had said “there’s a place in hell for you,” then had slammed down the phone. Sally was done too and we left together. Hank and Roger, both sunburned, were sitting by their desks. They were sweaty and Hank’s wet t-shirt clung to his stomach like cellophane. They had apparently just returned from doing a tent fumigation for termites.

            Gary pointed to Sally and me. “We have these girls to thank for making us money.”

            The men grinned at us and clapped.

            Although I managed to get them some customers Sally brought in the most. Occasionally I had listened to her sales pitch: “Termites right now could be eating away at your wood floors, the wood frames holding your house together, and even your wood furniture. You don’t always see them. That’s why you need a termite inspection and right now you’re in luck—the inspection is free, an offer that won’t last long and let me tell you inspections can be pricey.” I should’ve copied her embellished approach but just couldn’t muster it.            

             “We are raking in the dough,” Gary said, beaming. “We got ourselves a real Jewish shop!” This was said with a fake Yiddish accent that made me sick. “We’re not Jews but we’re getting as rich as Jews!”

            Everyone laughed except me. I wanted to storm out, not tolerate this bigotry. But I remained stoically staring at him. I needed this job only a few more weeks until I began classes and a job on campus.

            “Let’s call it a day and head over to Joey’s Saloon to celebrate,” he said. “Burbank Pest Control will take the tab. And we should carpool there.”

            Sally was beaming and said, “Sure, I’m in.”

            Roger slipped off his desk and approached me. “Come with me, Ellen,” he said, smiling at me in a way that made me uncomfortable. “I’ll drive us. I’d like your company.”

            I turned to red-faced Sally, who was narrowing her eyes at me. I turned back to him. “Thanks, but I have to go home. But I’m sure Sally would like a ride.”

            He came closer and his calloused hand took mine. He said softly by my ear, “I only want to be with you.”

            “I’m sorry, Roger, but I have a boyfriend.”

            “Sure you do.” His lips sagged into a frown. Then he turned away and walked out the door.

            Hank rushed over to me, his nostrils flaring. “Roger has been suffering something awful since his wife left him,” he said. “You should run out there and be with him. He needs female company right now.”

            I took a step away from this man who smelled briny from sweat. He also scared me. “I’m sorry but I’m about to get engaged to my boyfriend.” I hoped that explanation would satisfy him.

            His blue eyes glared at me. “I bet you have no such commitment. I know your type. You think because you’re a nice-looking chick you can turn a guy down whenever you choose!”

            Sally took his arm and they left together in a huff. Both looked upon me as the enemy.

***

            On Monday morning Sally glowered at me as soon as she sat across from me at the long table. “I make most of the sales but you took just as much credit,” she said sharply.         “You said nothing while everyone was applauding the both of us.”

            I knew she meant one person in particular—Roger.

            I agreed she should take credit for this “real Jewish shop” and said, “I’ll make an announcement right now that the success is mostly yours.”

            I was about to stand and leave for the front office when she said, “Don’t bother. Hank and Roger aren’t even here. They already left for an inspection.” She flipped open her phonebook. “Thanks to me!”

            I opened my phonebook to the page of P’s and was about to dial the number of Martin Paterson when she said, “Margie told me Roger has a thing for redheads. You should’ve gone with him. No offense, but that boyfriend of yours cares more about his dumb law books than he does about you. I bet he just wants you around to, well, take care of his urges.”

            She obviously meant to be offensive and avoided me at lunch, where I sat as usual by the outside table. I removed my book and opened to the scene of the poor blinded Earl of Gloucester lamenting, “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods;/They kill us for their sport.”  

            I shut the book and closed my eyes. I imagined I was at Zuma Beach, my bare feet enjoying the warmth of the sand. I walked into the foam of a breaking wave and enjoyed the cool water swirling around my ankles.

***

            I dutifully continued in my job, making calls, and occasionally providing Gary with a name of a potential customer. More often than not a termite fumigation followed. I couldn’t help but wonder if so many of those customers actually had a termite problem. If they didn’t, I was complicit in an unethical practice. Yet I did my best to discourage those I considered vulnerable. These chatty people let me know they lived alone.

            “Lester was the one to take care of bug problems,” said one woman. “But he’s left me for his receptionist. They were going to motels for three years while he told me he had to work late. I was stupid enough to believe him and felt bad he had to work such long hours. Meanwhile I enjoyed playing bridge and going shopping. I even felt guilty about it. But then one night when he came home around ten he said, ‘Gloria, I’ve been with another woman and it’s time for us to call it quits. I’m in love with Norma now.’” She sobbed into the phone. “Just like that he told me he wanted to end our marriage of twenty-two years and marry that whore who works in his office. She’s half his age.”

            “I’m so sorry,” I said. “You should consider dating.”

            “I feel too much of wreck right now to get myself out there again. It’s been so long since I dated last.” I heard her blow her nose. “So now tell me more about this bug inspection.”

            I lowered my voice and said, “I think you can wait on it.”

            “Sure, hon, thanks so much for listening.”

            There were more widows and divorcees who considered me a sympathetic ear—but not all of them. One savvy widow said to me, “Listen here, young lady, just because I’m old doesn’t mean I’m stupid. I don’t need no damn termite inspection.” The phone slammed shut.

            But then there was a man who said, “I suppose I should consider the inspection because ever since Barbara died and the kids moved out this house seems too big for me. My son told me I should sell it and move into an apartment for seniors. But Barbara loved this place and I still see her here—her spirit I mean. I just don’t know if I’m ready. What do you think?”

            I sighed deeply then said, “How about we call you in a few months. You might know better by then.”

            “Yes, why don’t you do that—I’ll look forward to your call.”

            I made a note for Sally. She’d be here in a few months. She didn’t speak to me much since Roger had shown a preference for me—as if that was my fault—but she had informed me that the company hired her permanently. I had congratulated her.

             I managed to survive working at Burbank Pest & Termite Control until the last week of August, when I had already informed Gary I’d have to leave and prepare for grad school.

            There was no farewell party for me on my last day. At five I merely closed my phonebook, waved good-by to Sally who was still on the phone with a customer, lifted my pad with two new potential customers, and my satchel. The three men sat behind their desks. Hank and Roger were sweaty as usual after returning from a fumigating job while Gary, their business manager, wore his usual neat button-down shirt tucked into slacks.

            I handed Gary my pad. “Here’s the last of it,” I said to him.

            He glanced at it and said, “You were the model employee—never came in late or missed a day. We appreciate that.”

            I noticed he mentioned nothing about my ability to acquire customers, which didn’t surprise me. I said a quick good-by to him and the other two men. I was about to walk out the door but stopped and turned back to Gary. “Oh, and by the way, I’m Jewish. And … and your Yiddish accent sucked.”

            I didn’t stay to see his reaction but rushed out the door. I walked briskly on Burbank Boulevard even though the day was brutally hot and felt the joy of liberation.

            When I entered my car, I decided I’d celebrate. I retrieved a map from my glove compartment. Then I turned on the engine and began my journey to Malibu. I’d be there in time to watch the sunset on Zuma Beach.



BIO

Hillary Tiefer has a PhD in English and has taught at Southern Oregon University and other colleges in the Pacific Northwest. Her short stories have been published in Descant, Red Rock Review, Mission at Tenth, Blue Moon Literary Review, Gray Sparrow Journal, Poetica Magazine, Poydras Review, Crack the Spine Literary Magazine, JuxtaProse, The Literary Nest, Smoky Blue Literature and Art Magazine, Five on the Fifth, The Opiate, The Manifest-Station, Pennsylvania Literary Journal and Minerva Rising Press’s The Keeping Room. Her novel The Secret Ranch is forthcoming the summer of 2025, published by Histria Books.









Don’t Call the Sea ‘Cerulean’

by Megan Howell



“Or azure, or ultramarine,” Mr. Hewitt adds. He cracks a wry smile. “Or periwinkle, or atrovirens, or paisley. It’s fine to call the ocean ‘blue.’”

No one laughs. Mara-Leigh, my best friend in English 206H, doodles in her planner, face blank as she makes little hearts with detailed, hairy, little nips on their rounded ends.

I raise my hand. “What’s atrovirens?”

“It’s a color,” Mr. Hewitt says.

“Yeah, but which one?”

“A shade of green.”

“Can’t oceans be green, though?”

Mr. Hewitt looks at me like he’s seeing me for the first time, though for the past ten or so minutes, he’s been picking apart the poem I wrote about Eternity Beach. The title is “Ode to Eternity.” I struggled coming up with each stanza because I could only think for so long before my worries—Mom, school—consumed me. My hope was that the same pain that held me back would filter through the words I picked out of a rhyming dictionary and transform into something beautiful.

“Of course, water can be green,” Mr. Hewitt says. “But what I’m trying to say is that you don’t have to give it an impressive-sounding name. Just write what you know.”

I nod my head. What I really want to do is cry. I’m angry at my teacher, but at the same time, part of me knows that my poem is overwrought.  

Mr. Hewitt pats me so lightly on the shoulder that I can only feel air—I think the school must have some policy against any physical contact. The feeling, or lack thereof, is a million times worse than the idea of him outright calling me a failure. I wonder if he prefers Mara-Leigh over me because of her looks, which he called Rockwellian during the unit on Norman Mailer’s American Dream.

“You’ll improve down the line,” he says.

I roll my eyes to stave off tears. I just want the class to move on, but he keeps going on and on about the ocean.

“I used to surf,” he says. He flashes a hang-ten sign. “Hard to believe, I know, but once upon a time in the 90s I was young and stupid. I drained my bank account to go to this beach in Portugal that has the highest waves in the world. Luckily, it rained my whole trip, so I didn’t get the chance to drown. I did eat a ton of arroz de pato, though.”

Silence. There’re still a few minutes left of class time. He won’t dismiss us early because he never does, not even when there was a fire drill. Instead, he goes on and on about the ocean and his three-year-old’s obsession with Finding Nemo.

“Asher’s at that age where he’s trying to understand the world,” he says. “My wife and I caught him filling up all our mixing bowls with water. She asks him what he’s up to, and he gives her this super serious look and goes, ‘I’m growing the fishes.’ He thought they’d just spawn out of thin air—or thin water, I guess.”

I purse my lips, waiting for the silence to return to crush his obnoxiously high spirits. Instead, kids giggle. Even Mara-Leigh smiles. Taciturn Mara-Leigh who only speaks when called on, and only in sparse, stripped-down sentences that mimic her prose poem about a shut-in. Of all my school friends, her and Marlowe and Kei are the most reserved.

I cry. I can’t help it. Mr. Hewitt’s schmaltziness stings. I prefer the judicial harshness of my old, sophomore year English teacher Ms. Antonucci. When she told me that my analysis of Helen Burns’s death in Jane Eyre impeccable, I believed her as much as I did when she said that my other, earlier work needed improvement. She didn’t give out consolations. Mr. Hewitt, however, writes them over all my papers, but no matter what I do he keeps giving me Bs and Cs.

Mara-Leigh sees me, sees my tears. What happened? she mouths. She whips her head around, searching for ghosts that only I can see.

I shrug, sniffling. Other kids are staring. I suddenly hate everyone and everything. And I absolutely despise the new boy who critiqued my poem the most during the writing workshop. He called my language “clunky.” When he speaks up, bringing up his great-grandmother’s life as a pearl diver in rural Japan, I glare at him. He stops midsentence, cocking his head at me so that I feel like I have no choice but to say something.

“I don’t get why everyone’s being so fucking mean for,” I say in between sobs.

Mara-Leigh won’t look at me anymore. She shields her blue—not azure, nor ultramarine, cerulean, etc.—eyes with her hands. I know I’m humiliating myself. The problem is that my self-awareness only pushes me to act even worse because I know there’s no going back. The whole grade will know about this moment before dismissal.

“My mom’s dying!” I yell.

No one speaks. I can hear this one girl, super annoying, typing on her laptop that she’s allowed to use in class for vague health reasons. I look at her and just know she’s talking about me in a huge group chat. One time, I heard her complaining to a bunch of senior girls’ about her friend’s eating disorder. The names that I want to call her make my mouth bitter, but I’m not quite daring enough to spit them out.  

I look up at the clock on the wall. Only ten minutes left of class. I stand up, grab my bag, and walk towards the door. I don’t ask to be excused. There’s no point. I just go.

“Well,” quips the boy with the pearl-diving family, “that was awkward.”

I let the door close on its own. Door opens, door closes—there’s a metaphor somewhere in all of this, I tell myself, something so powerful that it will surely make me the most authentic writer in the class. I start walking, but I don’t know where I’m going, only that I can’t stand being anywhere that I’ve ever been.

My mom really is dying. I just hadn’t told anyone at school before. I didn’t see the point in people knowing. I viewed my life as a seesaw, school on one side, home on the other—connected but distinct. Student and daughter, the two roles that I could play but never at the same time. If one was doing well, the other had to be plummeting to the earth. Freshman year: no friends, mediocre grades but also my Mom’s attention, which was so generous and overbearing—constant girls’ trips to national parks, restaurants, shopping malls, overpriced hotel tearooms—that I wondered if I’d always be that girl who had only her mother for company. Sophomore year: new friends, good grades but Mom’s cancer. Now, just one month into my junior year, the seesaw is broken. It’s bent at the middle, an upside-down u, a frowny face with two negative ends.

I just want my life’s destruction to be entirely my dad’s fault. He’s the one who called up the apartment last month to say I should plan on moving in with him and his new wife in Mississippi. Of course, I hung up. I couldn’t find the words, could barely speak to Mom when she asked if anyone had called. Writing became impossible after that.

I go into the bathroom and turn on the sink only to turn it back off again. Maybe I’m finally free, I think as I stare into my reflection and wait to feel something. My hair’s a mess, but at least I don’t have to be anything for anyone anymore, neither friend nor daughter, not even a promising student. I wonder who I am when I’m alone like this. Myself? Or nothing at all?

I hear someone come in. A new wave of shame rushes over me, making me hot again.

Agnes Rivera is looking at me weirdly. I say hi under my breath. She says nothing back, just steps around me and goes to apply mascara two sinks down from mine.  

I think she’s this way with me because people are always mixing us up all the time even though I’m Black and she’s supposedly not, her dad from somewhere in Peru where the people happen to have tightly coiled hair and full lips. Being near me makes her half-Danish side seem less exotic, I guess, but maybe I’m just being bitter. Maybe she doesn’t yet know that I lost my mind today.

“Agnes,” I say.

She looks up.

“I’ve never told anyone this,” I go on, “but it’s flattering whenever someone mistakes me for you. You’re super gorgeous.”

“Oh,” she says. “Thanks.”

“D’you think we look similar? Be honest.”

“Honestly?” She looks me up and down. “I think you dress kinda badly.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. You dress like someone who pretends not to care what people think while actually caring a lot. The pants you have on plus that sweater make you look like you write essays on, like, why it’s sexist to separate women’s clothing from the men’s.”

I laugh. The performance that I’ve been putting on for so long is over and I can poke fun at it like a retired actor reflecting on their worst movie. I thought that I was meant to be a quirky intellectual because the world let me be—it was one of the personas I could choose from, either that or loner; I never thought that I could be anything more here.

“Sorry,” I say, “it’s just that, before I came here, I’d always dressed super feminine because that’s all my mom bought me: froufrou dresses and stuff—lots of Lily Pulitzer. I became known for being like that for a while. Feminine, always in pigtails. I wore what I was given.”

“What’s your preferred style?”

“No clue.”

“Do you have a favorite color palette? A favorite color?”

“A period ago, I would’ve said cerulean.”

I expect her not to know what that is, but she nods and says, “That’s a pretty color. It reminds me of the Cycladic Islands.”

I nod along, but in truth, I don’t know what cerulean really is, only that it’s a shade of blue—light or dark, I have no clue. I wonder if Agnes can sense my ignorance. She takes out her phone and pulls up a picture of white stucco houses in Greece, pointing at their blue roofs, which blend in with the bright blue sky. They’re beautiful in a way that makes me sad because my mom’s in a coma and can’t travel anymore.

 “I have to go,” I say.

 “Well,” Agnes says, looking me up and down with a concerned look, “I guess I’ll see you.”

“Maybe. I don’t know yet.”

“Are you moving?”

A large group of girls streams into the restroom. The bell rings as one of Agnes’s friends runs up and hugs her like they haven’t seen each other in decades. “Aggie!” she squeals. “You’ll never guess what happened.” She turns, sees me, and clasps her mouth over her hands as I fast-walk out into the hallway.

#

Mom’s asleep, not dead, her chest rising and falling as one of the palliative care nurses writes something on the little white board below the TV. I comb her long hair with my fingers. The machines keeping her alive chug along indifferently.

“Mom,” I say. “It’s me. Leelee.”

Nothing I say feels true anymore. No one calls me Leelee but her, and she hasn’t been conscious for a while now. To everyone including my dad and all four of my older sisters, I’m just Leanne. Constance, my oldest sister, the one who’s staying with me—“watching over me,” she says as if I’m still five—won’t stop texting me. My phone keeps buzzing. I can hear her yells already. Leanne, Leanne! Your school said you skipped. What the hell, Leanne?

I wonder if Mom’s favorite color is pink or if she only starting saying that when she had daughters. Lately, I’ve been feeling like I know less and less about her. My memories of her feel as sparse as the obituary she wrote for herself. Danielle Hastings, PhD. Mother, sister, wife, scientist. I wanted to hate the description, but couldn’t think of much to add that didn’t fall under those few categories. I know that she was the last of four siblings, most of whom have already passed; that she grew up in south Texas, moved to Hawaii for college, and stayed here in Honolulu for work; that part of her still loves my dad even though he cheated when she was still pregnant with me. If she lived forever, I’d still never learn what she was like when she was alone. I couldn’t just listen in to her private thoughts that used to make her smile while she did the dishes and laundry.  

My mind won’t focus on Mom. She’s too much, I can’t take her or her pain anymore and almost wished she’d been abusive so that I could be unfeeling in the face of her suffering. I think about the picture Agnes showed me of those pretty, blue-domed houses that overlooked the sea.

I want to go to the beach. I don’t want to just play in the sand, though. What I crave is the ocean. I need to dive into it, let the waves wash over me. Mom never learned to swim. She was terrified of the ocean. I wasn’t allowed to go near it when I was with her, not even after I’d started taking swim classes at the Y. I think what I really want is to be truly alone.  

“I’m going to go in the ocean,” I whisper in Mom’s ear, half-hoping she’ll wake up and say absolutely not. She doesn’t wake up, though. But the ghost of her concern for me still holds me back.

It’s literally right there, a thin cerulean strip between hills and sky. It’s a completely separate world that goes miles deep and sprawls outward for what feels like forever. I can smell the seawater, which the hospice’s brochure advertises as medicinal as if the residents aren’t going to die anyways.  

#

Walking to the beach takes much longer than I thought. When I finally get there, it’s late and I’m already exhausted. The setting sun is a punctured egg yolk bleeding shades of orange and red onto the sky. Everyone’s gone except for a homeless man chain-smoking under a makeshift lean-to.

I undress. The air is cold. The water is much colder. Every inch of my skin screams out as I frog-kick in just yellow undies towards what feels like the end of the world. This, I decide, is the ocean’s true form. Not cerulean but inky black and very lonely. I go out so far that my arms start to ache.

I’m not trying to kill myself. I just happen to be thinking about death when the rip tide grabs me and drags me far away. I don’t panic. I know there’s no point in screaming because there’s no one around but me and a million little sea creatures who don’t care about me. I’m not thinking about the ocean safety lessons from elementary school, my mind too worn down to remember that strong currents drown those who attempt to fight them.

In this moment, I’m just curious. I want to know where the world will take me to when there’s no one else around. I close my eyes and let go. Then I’m underwater. I imagine that my obituary would be just like Mom’s minus the wife and scientist parts. Maybe someone would call me a promising or even skilled writer. But no one would know that my favorite color is now red-sky-at-morning or that I really want to go to Greece. These private pieces of me would die with my body if I don’t make it to shore. I’d never get to share them.

By the time the fear starts tingling in my brain, the current has already dissipated. It screams out as I struggle swimming back to where I came. I’m not particularly strong, I just really want to feel loved. I want to make more friends, maybe get married someday. I want to say goodbye to Mara-Leigh and fuck her older brother who flirted with me at her pool party last summer. Tomorrow, I’ll guilt my other sister Gianna into buying me the strappy type of sundresses I’ve been seeing a lot of in magazines. Then I’ll ask all my friends from class and soccer and marching band if they want to meet up, then we can go swimming, then out to eat, and then, and then, and then—on and on, desire after desire until I really die.

I crawl out of the water, coughing, sniffling, wondering why I’m still alive and if that reason is who I really am.  



BIO

Megan Howell is a DC-based writer. She earned her MFA in Fiction from the University of Maryland in College Park, winning both the Jack Salamanca Thesis Award and the Kwiatek Fellowship. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Nashville Review and The Establishment among other publications. Her debut short story collection Softie is forthcoming with West Virginia University Press in November 2024.









The Everlasting Hour

by Chris Jalufka


Murmurs of the threat had spread quickly, and a final confirmation was released: yes, a meteor strike was imminent. There was a date. In approximately two years, the rock would burn through the Earth’s atmosphere and dissolve into the size of a suburban tract home. “This is not a global extinction–level event, far from it,” they said, “but the states of California and Nevada will be evacuated to ensure a mortality rate of zero.” Businesses took aid from the government to relocate, and their staff followed. Most fled to the broad plains of the Midwest and the humid pockets of the Southern states.

One year in and the pace of the evacuation had found its rhythm. The impending strike had become just another event on the calendar, and six months to impact, the final push of the evacuation found the military combing the area, removing the stubborn and those in need of assistance. Still, two remained. Starlet had made up her mind. She would not leave San Francisco. She would become invisible. Present for the big show. Robert expressed the commonsense perspective of the situation to her. The meteor will strike and destroy the area. It wasn’t overly complicated. Animals disperse at the first sign of danger, yet Starlet had made the decision to deny all instincts—not to mention Robert’s appeals—to flee. He, too, did not want to leave San Francisco. He did not want anything to change, but their home was to be destroyed by cosmic design, and they could either be upset or accept this chance to completely refresh their lives.

“You’ll burn alive as soon as that thing is a mile through the atmosphere,” Robert remarked.

“Only one way to be sure of that,” Starlet reminded him.

“Do you understand that if you stay, you will die? And you want me to do the same? And for nothing. Because you wanted to see what would happen when you stood your ground against a meteor.”

“I know, I get it. Just imagine this—we’re sitting there on the beach and a speck appears in the sky. Ten seconds later, all life is erased. But, in those ten seconds we will be inside a unique moment in the timeline of this planet. A rock from outer space is coming at us, Robert. Think of that. We’ll experience the same fate as the dinosaurs. Just you and me. This has never happened in any human lifetime.”

“Pompeii,” he said. “We know how that went.”

“That was a volcano,” Starlet said.

“We can go anywhere in the world right now and you want to stay here? There is no need to stay. If you want to know what’s going to happen here, just watch television. Read the book. Watch the documentary. I don’t understand why this is worth dying over.”

“I don’t care about dying. That’s going to happen no matter what we do, eventually. I’m staying because there is nothing for me in this world that even compares to the chance at witnessing something truly monumental. I don’t want to watch the movie or read the book. I want to live it. We will be the main characters in our own lives, Robert.”

The strike area had been successfully evacuated and the couple walked the empty streets of their neighborhood. Free of the buses, cars, and other forms of human transportation, now each street was dusted with a fine layer of sand that blew in from the beach. They walked the Great Highway, an almost four mile stretch of road that followed the curve of the coastline and ran the length of the western-most edge of the city. The Great Highway was the final street before you crossed over to the dry shrub, sand dunes, and damp shore of Ocean Beach.

Starlet led Robert to a home that sat next to the final bus stop before you hit the water. The home’s orange coat of paint was peeling, torn apart from the constant abrasive assault of beach weather. The gate was open and the courtyard overgrown with ice plant and Seacliff buckwheat. Sand filled the corners of the doorway and the entrance was unlocked. She knew the home and had dreamt, at one time, of being invited in by the family of surfers who lived there.

“Huh, not what I expected,” Starlet said.

The home was empty. The occupants had packed up well. Starlet hadn’t considered what she might find inside, but she was still surprised to find that nothing was left behind. On summer mornings, Robert had walked with her down to the beach to sit on the dunes and watch the surfers. If they got there early enough, when they passed that house the garage door would be open. Starlet counted a dozen or so surfboards strapped to the walls and a few bicycles hung from the rafters. On some mornings, Starlet might find a young surfer pulling on a wet suit, and she’d give him a polite nod. She hadn’t figured out how many people lived there, but over time she could link three men to the house. One of them looked as old as her grandfather, and she assumed the other two were his grandsons. She would hear them in the garage mumbling about which board to take out and the conditions of the ocean. Two decades of dance had formed her inner clock, and she was proud of her ability to wake early and be ready for the day, but then she saw these surfers who woke up earlier and chose the frigid ocean as their morning prayer.

In the prolonged stress of the oncoming meteor Starlet kept an easy calm, something Robert was unable to achieve. He was missing whatever she had, that secret element that erased all fear. He was with her, that is all he knew and that is all he cared about. Robert looked to Starlet to balance what was happening in his mind. Instinct and commonsense. The urge to run, anywhere. End up as a dentist in Nebraska. Another house with a large television and a calendar of deadlines, due dates, and empty commitments. He imagined telling tell this story, too, of how he almost stayed behind with his girlfriend. “Remember when that meteor struck the West Coast?” he would say. “I was there. I almost died.”

The day had come, and they sat among the sea thrift and gum plants of the low dunes. There was a sense of loss marked by the muted city behind them, the streets empty of cars and human chatter, the distant call of the neighborhood cats and dogs silenced. The fog had scared off the local animals as well and gone was the missing squawk of gulls and threat of rats. Perhaps even the sharks that swam offshore, threatening those that entered the water, had moved on. In a city without people and animals the sand took over. The elements—wind, water, daylight—roared across San Francisco without resistance.

“We should set up a camera. Have the video sent immediately to the cloud,” Robert said.

“Don’t do that. Don’t spoil this,” Starlet said.

“I don’t understand giving up our lives for this experience and not even sharing a record of it. History will never know we were even here.”

“This is what freedom is­—existing outside of modern society. Embracing the cosmos. We’re free, Robert.”

Freedom was not on Robert’s mind, just the anticipation of the meteor. Would he die from a sense of burning? Will the waves of the Pacific Ocean pummel him through the decimated streets? Will the meteor itself eat up all the oxygen, suffocating them before the debris can crush their bodies? He had questions, but these were not what he wanted to share with Starlet. He wanted to live inside of her excitement. Starlet wanted to see it all happen, and not on a television screen or beneath the bright glass of a cellphone, but really see it with her own eyes, in real time.

Robert had taken steps in preparation for this moment. He felt it proper to settle his bills and business. Do the work to save those he would leave behind these menial tasks. He had messaged his mother about his whereabouts and hoped she would understand. She accused his love of Starlet of merely being an obsession with a beautiful woman. He rarely left the city, for his own mother or for anyone. Now he was going to get himself killed because of that woman. Yes, Robert’s love was an obsession, or his obsession with her had grown into love—either way, he was not going to leave her. Starlet was an attraction he couldn’t break. He clasped her hands in his and watched a smile fold out across her face. When he imagined how much he loved her, he saw this smile. The plump of her upper lip had a tiny divot at its center, and when her lips met, that divot created a miniature cave at the center of her joyous, silly mouth.

The meteor breached the atmosphere, they could see it high above the clouds. It appeared like the moon in broad daylight. It was gaining toward them, growing larger in the sky. Robert had assumed they would hold each other at this moment. Their heads tucked together like resting cranes, a single body. Now in it, Starlet was right. He wanted to see it all play out with his own two eyes.

A warm breeze shook the calm of the Pacific. The dried tines of the coastal buckwheat bent over Starlet’s bare feet. There was nothing to hear—no roar of blazing rock as the meteor broke the atmosphere, no final cries into cloudless sky. They watched the streak of the meteor cut through the blue above. They looked down and saw the shadow of rock cascading over the earth, dimming the orange of the Golden Gate Bridge, the deep green of the bay, and everything in its path. The ocean sunk down under the force of it. The Earth convulsed. The sky shook with an atmospheric deluge of energy. A colossal break in all things that make up the living world.

The meteor had made contact far off in the desert of Nevada.

Somehow they were still alive.

The city was overtaken by a great fog that streamed over the land and lifted up to the sky, an unending curtain of gray. They walked back to Robert’s apartment in silence. The building still stood, and only a few new cracks were added to the walls first erected in 1909, two years after San Francisco’s last great disaster.

“Holy shit,” she uttered.

Robert could only expel a slow moan. A child’s moan. The meteor had shaken the framed art from the walls and collapsed the bookshelves of photographs and a career’s worth of plaques, gifts, and trinkets. Starlet checked on the home’s vitals. Everything worked: the lights, the running water, even the television. The world had learned about what they had just experienced. On impact the meteor caused nothing more than a mid-tier fear-inducing earthquake. The contained apocalypse that was promised did not happen, but the sudden, dense fog that followed was unexpected.

Robert acted quickly in cleaning up. He moved in panic. In stunted movements, unclear of what, exactly, he should be doing. There were those broken things like vases and ceramic figurines, and there were those unbreakable things like books and photographs.

“There’s too much here. I knew it. I’ve always known it, I suppose. Look, I can reach down and here it is—a program from the 2002 San Francisco Opera production of Turandot.”

“Is that something you need?” Starlet asked.

“No. That’s the point I am attempting to reach if I can stay in this thought long enough. Do I need this opera program? No. Need. Imperative. I can’t say. It was the first opera I attended when I moved to the city. The sets were designed by David Hockney, which you should know. I think you should know.”

“Is it worth anything?” she asked.

“Nostalgia has its value. But this performance of this opera at this particular point in time has already been recorded into history. This physical reminder is redundant. It’s not that I don’t need it, it’s that it doesn’t need me. It will be remembered forever, even if I forget,” he explained.

“Throw it away.”

“Absolutely,” he said and paused. “Is the floor still shaking?”

“No. We’re motionless.”

“To be safe I won’t put anything high up on the shelves. No. Change that.”

Robert grabbed a few slats from the shelving and tossed them out of the window. The crash of dry oak and loose hardware echoed through the neighborhood, the frequency of splintered wood filled the night sky. Then Robert wrapped his arms around the bulk of the bookcase, heaving it out the window and onto the street below. He wanted the house to look as it never had before. Bare walls. Sofa, chairs, and bed. Simple living. He polished the hardwood floors and Starlet watched television.

Weeks had passed by and the sky held onto the muted steel of dusk light. There were claims that the sunlight would return once the chemical haze dispersed over the ocean, but the meteor continued to fume, and weeks after impact the haze remained. Robert sat in the chair and stared out of the window and into the everlasting hour, the media-designated moniker given to the steady blank gray fog that fell over the non-day. The city was lost to the movement of time: the cycle of the moon, the rise of the sun, the glow of the stars. They saw none of it. Only fog. Nothing to regulate the waking from the sleeping hours. From one day to the next. They lived in the constant colorless drone of a polluted slate cloud.

“Quite beautiful, isn’t it?” Starlet lounged on the sofa, content to simply stare outside. Robert drained the last of his drink and poured himself another from the bottle at his feet.

“I can’t tell if time has stopped.”

“Nope. Still going.”

“How can you be so sure?” he asked.

“News. Television. I’m connected.”

“Feels like we’re trapped in time. Trapped in something.”

“Does it matter?”

“I don’t know. I’m just trying to understand my future.” 

“This is the future. We’re experiencing it, more than anyone else anywhere in the world,” Starlet said.

“There’s nothing here.”

“Everything is here. You and me. Isn’t that all that matters?”

Starlet lifted her legs and Robert joined her on the sofa. She laid her legs over his lap and he fiddled with the loose skin of her kneecap.

Above the kitchen table where they ate hung an aged photograph suspended between two sheets of glass. This was the only non-essential Robert had allowed himself to keep. In the photograph: a figure, a dancer poised, toes outward. She is phantom-white against the dappled blackness of the theatre curtains behind her. Anna Pavlova in the title role of Giselle, two men at her feet. Giselle, a figure killed by heartbreak and deception. Robert was a patron of the arts and this print, dated 1931, was a gift from the Los Angeles Ballet as a thank for his support in their inaugural season. The gallery lights suspended above the piece confirmed its provenance. Starlet knew this photograph—a copy of course—from her childhood. Two weeks after her twelfth birthday, her parents had packed up Starlet’s bedroom in their suburban home and drove her to a ballet academy in Chicago where she was introduced to the physical nature not just of dance, but of its history as well. The career of dancer Anna Pavlova was held up as one to aspire to.

Her first visit to Robert’s house was after the closing performance of a new modern work. The choreographer had created the piece with Starlet in mind, and in certain circles, it was quite the event. Robert was a major sponsor and hosted a post-performance reception. She had missed the photograph when she first walked through Robert’s house, but later that night on a trip to the kitchen for another glass of wine she saw Anna again.

As a dancer Starlet had spent the bulk of her life in study. Her free time used up attending events: fundraising dinners, annual galas, benefit luncheons, and the occasional appearance at backstage tours of the ballet house. Her dalliances were either with other dancers or people she met at these work events, and it was Robert’s donation to the ballet company that facilitated his attendance at each of her rehearsals for Massenet’s Manon. Eventually, he went from being just another guest to being the only one she wanted to see. Robert was a force of calm—it followed him wherever he went. Starlet could walk hand in hand with Robert at those career-making events and not get frustrated with the idiocy she saw in the business of the arts. She just wanted to dance, but she also had to compete with and outperform her peers. She was a small woman and had been a smaller girl. There was a constant eye kept on her weight and body form. Enough muscle to do the movements, but not so much that the bulge of muscle broke the line of her body. She made herself perfect. Her fellow dancers seethed at each of her successes. Starlet internalized their jealousy and became stronger. She made herself beyond perfect. Starlet, the rare dancer that was just as brilliant at thirty-nine as she was at eighteen, was at peace with her isolation.

She thought of her relationships before the meteor and how they were all grounded in her beauty. It was the sexual attraction that kept her busy. She could be as occupied with men as she liked but she could not turn it off. Men would complement her beauty. Men would follow and linger, timid and afraid in her presence. She had her pick of them. Robert had begun in that pool, but for him, for him only, their relationship had developed to something beyond what she had previously allowed.

As tests were still being done remotely to determine exactly what the fog was and why the downed meteor continued to spew the vapor from deep within its crater, the impact area remained empty. The world watched as the fog engulfed the entirety of California, deep into Nevada and southern regions of Oregon. Robert thought of the fog, he thought of its chemical make-up, the long-lasting medical conditions brewing in his respiratory system. He had begun to ache for his old life. Without a job he had no purpose, and without the constant pestering of his mother he felt no urgency to do better. He could feel the fog fold around him, in his hands and face. He imaged the fog taking him around the neck and easing down his shirt collar and covering him like a spider’s web.

Starlet opened a can of spinach and a tin of sardines afloat in tomato broth and poured both into a small steaming pot. No living food had survived the fog. The farmlands roiled into gaseous swamplands; the livestock, left behind, scattered across the coast for their own private deaths. Processed foods became vital for survival, and after months of trial and error Starlet had mastered her own personal combination of iron-rich foods. They drank the powdered milk and fortified vitamin mixes they’d taken from the corner shops, and she had never felt so healthy since early in her dance career.

“We can drive out of this fog and go wherever we want to. Drive to Santa Fe and grab a flight to anywhere. The rest of the world is out there, waiting,” Robert offered.

“The world is here too,” Starlet told him.

“Is it? Because I don’t feel like anything is here. Not me. Not you. Nothing.”

“There is no one else in the world right now experiencing this. Just us. You and me.”

“I know. I get it. We’re doing it, but can we be done with it? You won. Let’s celebrate to the future,” Robert said.

“Just wait, the future will come.” Starlet divided the pot of steamed spinach and sardines between them, took a packet of crackers from the cabinet, spread the algae-like mixture over the salted wheat.  

Remote rovers entered the desert from a makeshift camp set up by a collection of global scientists. Cameras fixed on each, the rovers surrounded the rim of the crater and fed the world a non-stop stream of video. This stream was broadcast as Camera One. Robert had hoped that someone out there was in the midst of preparing for the reoccupation, yet there had been no outside contact with the impacted area. A fear of contamination, of upsetting the isolated bubble of the fog, kept a rush of scientists at bay until more was known. Starlet kept her television on Camera One. From the pit a steady flow of basalt particles winnowed into the air. The meteor was barely visible behind its spew of fog.

“I’d like to see it. In person,” she said.

“What?”

“The meteor. Visit the crater. See this for myself.”

 “And then what?”

“Then I would know what’s kept me here. What’s kept us alive.”

“Really? You want to go?” Robert perked up at Starlet’s first sign of movement.

“Yes. It’s time.”

 Robert loaded an abandoned car with gas, water, and enough food for a day or two, and they drove in silence through the dense ash of the empty coast and across the dead expanse of California. Signs for abandoned gas stations and hotels, truck stops and weigh stations, speed limits that held no purpose. The fog thickened and misted against the window glass. The asphalt of the highway broke and they drove on the pure ionized soil of the new barren Earth.

“Do you think it’s safe, getting this close?” he asked.

“About as safe as staying home for a meteor strike.”

He nodded, wondering why he even asked. Safety had become a foreign concept.  

“Drop me off wherever. If you’re afraid, I can go alone.” she said. “I’ll walk from here.”

“Fine. This is not something I need to see.”

Robert stopped the car and watched as Starlet headed toward the crater’s edge, deep into the fog. He had yet to see the crater himself. He had let his fear get the best of him. Starlet would watch Camera One and he would leave the room. Unwilling to see his situation from an outsider’s perspective. He had feared knowing the truth. The world was still there, same as it ever was. Their isolation was unnecessary. He sat in the car and realized he hadn’t bothered to buckle his seatbelt. It was odd, but he found himself surprised by this.

He finally got the nerve to switch on the radio and soon he heard a voice describe the weather in Boise. Another spoke of stocks and the economy. Growth in the marketplace. The statistics of modern sports flowed between two voices, arguing over the virtues of unknown athletes.

Hours passed. No sign of Starlet. He thought of the time when all of this would be over, and life would be normal again. He saw a backyard with a grill and a swimming pool with a painted blue bottom. Another office: this time he would work somewhere that gave him as much free time as he wanted. He could see himself playing tennis and learning piano. In his mind, he saw Starlet.

Robert stepped out into the drizzle of ash and shouted her name into the fog. His voice rang out across the empty horizon. He missed her and could not believe he let her walk off alone. He wasn’t thinking. He hadn’t thought straight since first meeting Starlet. His love. The woman who turned all beauty around her invisible. On stage with the members of the corps de ballet, and Starlet was all he saw. His stomach ached. Nerves and panic. They had driven halfway through the fog. Once she had seen the meteor for herself, they could keep driving east. Give up whatever it was they were living and return to the world. He just needed for it to make sense to her. He needed her to be done. To return from her pilgrimage and get back in the damn car.

Robert drove through the fog, honking the horn and flashing the headlights. Starlet was out there, and he would find her. The fog thickened. He was close to the crater. It was a strange feeling, the fog at each window, nothing to give away which way he was heading. The sand swarmed around the car, clinking against the glass. He pounded on the horn in rhythmic spurts, a propulsive noise to puncture the din of sand on glass. The car slid and it reminded him of driving in the city during a heavy rain. Except he could see in the rain. He was driving blind. He knew if he drove too close the car could fall into the crater, or maybe crush one of the cameras. Maybe someone would see him on television, a sign of life, and come to their rescue.

Robert couldn’t risk hitting Starlet. He stepped out of car and began to shout. It didn’t help to search the area because there was nothing to see. He needed to reach a city. Any city. In a city he could find the police. He would tell them it was safe and the fog was no threat. In a city there would be an authority who could locate Starlet in the desert. He returned to the car and drove toward the Utah border out of the thick fog and into the sunlight. Another surprise. His hands where bone white on the wheel. The fog had bleached all color from his body and clothes. The fog grew thin and there were colors he didn’t remember. The desert was an iridescent gold. Within that gold were deep greens and blues. Shades of coral and the insides of seashells. The world was new to him again.

He felt light. Weightless.

The loose sand turned to road and at the first exit he found a diner. Robert checked himself in the dashboard mirror and saw his ashen face. Colorless, a strange ghost. He took a seat at the counter like they do in movies. The waitress asked if he needed an ambulance, but no, just a glass of water. His white fist around the glass made the water appear like the purest of blue. The waitress returned with a menu and Robert nodded to the television mounted above the window into the kitchen.

“Does that work?” he asked.

“Yeah. You sure about that ambulance though?”

“I need the cops. Call the cops, okay?”

The waitress placed a dish with a packet of crackers in front of him and refilled his water glass. She grabbed the remote and turned on the television and tossed him the remote.

“Stay here, all right? I’ll get the cops on the phone.”

Robert took the remote and found Camera One. The fog had no specific shape. It was an endless cloud. He wondered if the police would arrest him or if they would even believe him. Is there anything to explain? They stayed home when everyone else left. It was simple and he couldn’t see anything they had done wrong. They couldn’t be arrested, of course not. He was feeling better and finished off the packet of crackers. He devoted his attention to Camera One.

With a squint he made out the dull outline of the meteor in the gray haze. There was a shadow cast from within the fog. Petite. An upright skeleton. It was Starlet.

The waitress refilled his water glass, “Cops are on the way. Can you hang tight?” 

“For sure. I’m fine.”

“Doesn’t seem like it.”

His hand around the glass, missing. From the wrist on, his fingers gone. Wet ash against the glass, a pile of white dust on the countertop.

“I told the cops you’d need a doctor too.”

Robert watched behind her, on the screen, Starlet stood in front of the meteor as an apparition. He stood up, shouting at the screen, “That’s her. Are the cops here yet?”

“Not yet.”

Another customer came in. With them came the dull wail of a siren. The waitress moved her hand to Robert’s shoulder but was too afraid to touch him. It didn’t matter. He saw Starlet and she was alive and that was all the comfort he needed. Now that he saw her, he knew he could find her. He just needed to try harder.

“I have to go, okay? Tell the cops I had to go.”

“They’re going to be here any minute. You can hear the sirens.”

Robert rushed for the door. He ran to the car and pictured an afternoon spent lying about in bed, of twisted sheets, and most of all he thought of Starlet’s smile, and by the time he reached the car there was nothing left of him beyond a brief huff of smoke, lost to the desert sky.



BIO



Chris Jalufka writes fiction and non-fiction, focusing on the arts. His work has been published in Print Magazine, HOW Magazine, Content Magazine, Juxtapoz, Nerdlocker, and Evil Tender. Most recently he has written the forward for Object Compendium, a collection of works by the Swiss artist Kilian Eng, published by Floating World Comics. 







D-Day at Eighty

by Nadine Revheim



            My dad, Frank Revheim, landed on Normandy Beach on the second day. I guess that is why he survived. I always wondered if his job was to pick up the bodies left behind from that first day of carnage. Or perhaps he hauled supplies to replenish those depleted by the survivors who scaled the cliffs.

            I wonder how the troops were divided. Who was selected for the first day? The young? The unmarried? And who were the remaining souls that were thought to be worth saving for the long fight ahead?

            I always pondered.

            But I never asked.

            Not even after we went to see the movie The Longest Day with his friend from work, who asked him at the end of the movie, “Was it really like that, Frank?”

            “Yes,” Dad replied.

            I guess his response was enough for me. Maybe I really didn’t want to know anything more than that.

            But if he were alive today, watching the memorial services for the 80th anniversary of the epic battle that would liberate France, then Europe, I’d ask many questions so that he’d share some of his memories. The memories of his pounding heart as he raced forward over the beach and towards the escarpment with his equipment and weapons weighing him down. The sense of dread as he saw the fallen and wondered if he might be next. The reflection on meeting his brother Reidar in England. Reidar, who was serving in the Norwegian Navy, sought him out because he heard the 99th Battalion of Norwegian-Americans serving in the US Army were on the base awaiting orders. I imagine he would remember the hope he had in his heart because they went to a photographer’s studio to take a photo together. They marked the occasion they saw each other after 11 years apart; my dad left for America at 19 years old and his brother was only 10. I wondered if he remembered the song and lyrics to the Vera Lynn classic, “We’ll Meet Again”, not knowing where or when, but repeating those words over and over like a mantra to bolster his courage. I wonder if he thought about whether he’d see his 30th birthday in October 1944. Or whether he’d see his wife, Jenny, again in Brooklyn, his new home so far away from Haugesund, Norway. And I would ask how he prayed, not if he prayed. I would ask if he cried as he remembered what he saw in Normandy.

            My father cried. I saw him cry when he listened to music. When he left for work because he’d be away for two weeks. When he wrote a letter to his family in Norway. When we sang along with Mitch Miller. When he played the accordion. Or the organ. He cried when the doctors told him he needed brain surgery. When the biopsy showed it was mesothelioma. When I told him it metastasized from the lungs. He cried when the ambulance got him home because he knew I had saved him from dying in the hospital.

            “I didn’t know if I’d ever see you again,” he said, as I pulled the nasal-gastric tube from his nose. The hospital hadn’t removed it even though they knew he was entering home hospice.

            He said it was okay when I got angry that he didn’t eat. When I had to remove thick mucus from his larynx because he was too weak to cough it out, I swiped and wiped in the back of his throat with a sponge on a stick.

         “I’m glad you taught me how to fish in the fjords of Norway,” I said, remembering how we reeled in the red cod we caught. He laughed.

            I remember how special it was to have my father home for the week he was off from working on the tugboat. I remember how he vacuumed and dusted to help my working mom. How he cooked his specialty, fried mackerel, first dredging it in flour tossed with salt and pepper, then placing it carefully into the melted butter until crisp.

            I remember chopping down trees in the woods on the property in Pennsylvania before the country house was built and asking him if he was trying to turn me into the son he never had. The son that was stillborn six years before I was born. I remember how he told me he sang “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby” to me. I remember the pink and floral alarm clock he gave me that played “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’.”

            I remember his smile. How he always broke into a dance when he was feeling happy. Or sad. How we did the two-step and the polka. How he waltzed with me standing on top of his feet.           

            I will never forget his feet. His tender and soft soles that carried him through seventy-six years of life. Over the beach at Normandy and through western Europe. I remember the feet that he said hurt from time to time and that when they ached, everything else ached too.

            “Take care of your feet and they’ll take care of you,” he said to me, many times.

            My dad did not get to see the 50th anniversary reunion of veterans returning to Normandy in 1994. I watched the TV broadcast alone and cried as I thought about missing him since his death in 1991. I didn’t know that my Uncle Reidar was there with the other Norwegian sailors who survived the battle and were honored by the Norwegian government. I would like to imagine that they would have been together, once again, to take another photo to celebrate the lives they returned to after the war. They would tell their favorite story of how Reidar knocked on the door where my dad’s troops were located, and how he almost walked away after my father kept saying it couldn’t be his brother who was just a little boy. But they were both men facing the biggest challenge in their lives, two men who recognized the grace they had to survive.

            Those feelings are present now and are even stronger since the American veterans present at the ceremony on June 6th, 2024 are in their late 90s and even 100s. My dad wouldn’t be there; he would have been 113 years old. But hopefully I will get to Normandy someday to visit the memorial that pays tribute to all who crossed the beach and have crossed to the other side. For my dad, and for the brave, with prayers and hope that our world will always remember the ‘war to end all wars’ so that tyranny will not have the final word, once again.

ACTIVITY DURING WWII

PRIVATE FIRST CLASS. SERVED OCTOBER 30, 1942 TO DECEMBER 21, 1945. ENTERED SERVICE WITH THE 99TH BATTALION, A SPECIAL UNIT OF NORWEGIAN NATIONALS AND TRAINED AT CAMP RIPLEY, MINNESOTA AND CAMP HALE IN COLORADO. SERVED IN CENTRAL EUROPE, NORTHERN FRANCE ON D-DAY PLUS 2, IN THE NORMANDY INVASION AND RHINELAND. PERFORMED VARIOUS DUTIES IN CONNECTION WITH THE STORAGE AND HANDLING OF ALL TYPES OF AMMUNITION FOR THE 95TH BOMB SQUAD, ARMY AIR FORCE. SAW ACTIVE DUTY AS A RIFLEMAN WITH THE 99TH INFANTRY BATTALION. AWARDED DISTINGUISHED UNIT BADGE, EUROPEAN-AMERICAN-MIDDLE EASTERN SERVICE MEDAL, GOOD CONDUCT MEDAL AND THE WWII VICTORY MEDAL.



BIO

Nadine Revheim, PhD, a licensed psychologist, occupational therapist, and author. Her forty-year career in mental health was primarily focused on research and clinical programs for individuals with schizophrenia with various professional publications. She is currently self-employed as a private practitioner in behavioral health for individuals and couples. Her memoir, Woven Together: Finding Me in Memories of You, is in press with Cape House Books. She has written an ad hoc blog, “Beacon Bits” – A Bite of the Hudson River Valley (beaconnybits.blogspot.com) for over ten years. Other recent published works have appeared in The Highlands Current and The Keepthings.







One of the Guys

by Renee S. Jolivette


Red taillights glowed through the windshield, guiding my path. They turned right towards Chico State. I continued straight, forced now to stretch my head and shoulders out the driver’s side window. Icy rain pelted my face. It vanquished my hangover but drenched my wool suit, making me smell like a wet dog.

I cursed the jackwad who stole my wiper arm.

The west side of our grey cinderblock office was saturated. The storm was tapering off. Another would follow in the coming days. Typical weather pattern for the northern Sacramento Valley. Once the rainy season started a person could mold while waiting for spring. I hated the rain just like I hated this town.

I got my engineering degree from the University of Arizona in 1979. A recession was creeping across the country back then. It hadn’t reached California yet and I’d been lucky to find an entry-level position here. The companies who were still hiring were anxious to add women to their professional rank and file. My employer’s recruiter said there would be plenty of opportunities for advancement and relocation. Hoping for an upgrade to their San Francisco office, I moved from Tucson to Chico sight unseen. That was five years ago. Five years of working my butt off in the same construction management job, no promotion in the offing.

The recruiter said Chico was God’s country. Also a lie. God’s country would have a better shopping mall.

I tucked my purse into my gender-neutral briefcase and hurried inside.

#

“Got time for a cup?” Mickey stood at my desk in his dress shirt and jeans. It was ten a.m.

“No,” I said. “But I could use one after last night.”

He flashed that grin of his. I checked my conscience. I was fine. I pushed a stack of paperwork aside and followed him out the back door.

 “Let’s take your truck,” I said. “My wipers are out of commission.”

Mickey winced when he saw the Mustang. The jagged aluminum remnants of the driver’s side wiper arm pointed skyward.

“I couldn’t see shit comin’ in this morning,” I said. “I swear the guy who broke it was trying to kill me.”

Mickey placed his palm on the small of my back, steered me towards his orange F-150 and pulled a mangled windshield wiper from the bed.

“What the…?” I backed away.

“I didn’t do it, darlin’.” He unlocked the passenger side door. Knew better than to open it for me.

Inside the cab, he handed me the broken wiper arm. “Stacey tried to beat the crap out of me with that last night. I was wondering where it came from.”

 “Oh my god. What did she say?”

“She wasn’t in the mood to talk.”

“I’m sorry.” My skin prickled, my neck burned. My conscience not so fine now.

“You’ve got nothing to be sorry for,” he said.

“I thought she and her friends were going dancing.”

 “They decided not to drive in the storm.”

“Probably a good call.”

“They got into our stash of coke instead. That stuff always makes Stace’ a little crazy.” His upper lip twitched as he talked. Like he couldn’t decide whether or not to smile. It was one of my favorite things about him. When the grin finally bloomed, it lit up his round face and formed small lines at the corners of his denim-blue eyes.

#

I slipped into my side of our usual booth at Perko’s, tugging at my skirt to protect my nylons from the cracked vinyl seat. “You don’t think Stacey saw us?” My hands shook as I reached for my mug.

“She saw my truck at your place.”

“She knows we go drinking together.”

“Doesn’t mean she likes it.” He poured cream and way too much sugar into his coffee. “You heard from Dale?”

“No.” I crossed my arms to stave off an internal chill. “I’m a little worried. The storm hit the Delta pretty hard. I called the paper and left a message. The receptionist said he wasn’t available. Guess he’s on deadline.”

“He still living on your boat?” Mickey asked.

I nodded. “Must’ve been a wild ride last night.”

Dale ran the Isleton Gazette—a weekly newspaper—for an absentee publisher. The job didn’t pay much. He was living out of his truck when I met him. I let him stay on my 26-foot cuddy—an older Sea Ray that I’d bought on the cheap at a government auction. It was docked at a marina on the Mokelumne River, two hours south of Chico. The arrangement worked out well. I got down there about once a month to go fishing.

“Poor guy,” Mickey said. “When are you going to make an honest man out of him?”

“We like things the way they are. We have fun when we see each other but we can still live our own lives.”

“Those long-distance deals never seem to work out.”

 “Like I’m going to take relationship advice from you.” I flicked a wadded napkin at him. He chuckled and batted it away.

 Back in his truck, I plucked a cassette from the dash. Pancho and Lefty. The album had come out the previous year.

“You remember singing along with that last night?” Mickey said.

“Vaguely. I believe you were doing most of the singing.”

“It’s a talent.” A smile lurked beneath his deadpan expression. “But you insisted on listening to the radio. Don’t ya like Willie and Merle?”

“You kept playing the same two songs.”

 “You tried to throw the tape out the window.”

I didn’t remember that. I did recall hitting the preset button for Chico’s country and western station.

 “So I had an early meeting this morning,” he said. “When I start up the truck, the Farm and Ranch Report almost blasts me out of the cab. Some guy shouting about rice futures.”

“Drunk volume.” I had to laugh.

Mickey’s life was an anthology of barroom tales, most based on his own foibles. I achieved a degree of immortality each time I featured in one of his stories. And his joking always dispelled the stale-whiskey fog of self-loathing that would envelope me the morning after a bender.

Back in the office parking lot, he pointed to my car. “I can help you fix that. Maybe Sunday?”

“I’ll be in Isleton this weekend. But thanks. Anyway, you should probably stay close to home for a while.”

“Stacey went to the City to visit her sister.”

 I bit my lower lip and studied Mickey’s face. The impish grin was gone but his gaze was level, his brow smooth. I couldn’t tell if he was serene or resigned.

“We’re okay,” he said. “She’s pissed right now and needs a break from my sorry ass. She’ll take it out on our charge cards and everything will be back to normal when she gets home.”

I phoned Dale again that afternoon. The receptionist said he was busy.

“Could you tell him that Reggie Andersen called?”

“He has your message from this morning. I’m sure he’ll get back to you when he can.”

“Okay, thank—” I heard the dial tone— “you.”

Bitch.

There were no other gals in my office, save for the boss’s secretary. I liked it that way. Women scared me. Having a conversation with one was like playing three-dimensional chess—things happening on several levels. Guys were more straightforward. They said what they meant. And I could usually tell what they were thinking. I preferred to be one of the guys.

#

Friday. Quitting time. A pack of us walked down the hall to the back door. Half of the people I worked with were engineers. The rest were in the trades. Most were at least eight years older than me.

Mickey was talking about the 49ers’ performance in the playoffs and their prospects for the 1984 season. The guys crowded around him. Everyone wanted to be his friend. His confidant. It felt good to be part of his inner circle.

“You headed to the Delta tonight?” Mickey asked me. A couple of the men moved closer to hear my answer.

“Tomorrow,” I said. “It’s supposed to rain tonight and the wiper arm is back-ordered at the dealership.”

“You want to go to the Towne Lounge with us?” Arnie was a right-of-way acquisition agent. Slim, soft-spoken, thirtyish. Divorced, with male pattern baldness. “You can ride with me.” He looked at Mickey as if for permission.

“I’m going to sit this one out, fellas.” I’d had enough excitement for one week.

#

The Isleton paper was in my mailbox that night. Articles and photos by Dale Bixby. The pictures were startling. Untethered boats drifting in the current. A broken dock lodged against a bridge abutment. Three RV parks were flooded, their full-time residents displaced. One photo showed people packed inside the western-themed dining room of the Rio Bar and Grill—an impromptu shelter. The cover story asked readers to bring donations of food and clothing. I always stopped at the grocery store on my way to the boat to keep the cuddy’s fridge stocked with food and Dale’s favorite beer. I could pick up some additional canned items before I went to the marina.

The marina.

I called the harbormaster’s after-hours number. No answer. Nothing I could do until morning. I burrowed under the covers, hugging my pillow while sheets of rain slapped at the windows.

#

Early the next day, I threw my duffle and fishing gear into the car and headed south on State Route 99. The sun broke through a low layer of clouds, forming tule fog in the pastures. A red-tailed hawk surveyed the dormant surroundings from its perch on a split rail fence post. A winter groundskeeper ready to remove any bit of life that dared disturb the season’s desolate landscape. I missed Arizona. Wished, not for the first time, that I’d gotten a job there.

I turned onto Highway 160 and followed the Sacramento River downstream. The shot rock lining the channel was barely visible above the water line. Huge snags floated in the mud-brown torrent. An orphaned red and white ice chest bobbed in the mix.

The counterweights were down on the Isleton drawbridge, allowing a sheriff’s vessel to pass. Usually a boat that size could clear the underside of the bridge. Today the water was too high.

 I drove down off the levee road and onto Main Street, past the Tong building. Built in the 1920’s, the abandoned, corrugated metal structure was once a meeting place for the area’s Chinese immigrants. A green sign marked Isleton’s city limits: Pop. 900. Elev. 10.

#

Jack’s Country Market in Isleton was smaller than the IGA store in nearby Rio Vista but more convenient. Its warm air carried the aromas of freshly ground beef and Pine Sol. I strolled the narrow aisles amidst the humming of refrigerated cases and fluorescent light fixtures.

There was one checkstand open. The cashier was a plump girl, maybe twenty-three years old. A few years younger than me. She was helping the only other customer.

“Can you believe all the damage?” The customer spoke with a slight drawl. She wore a hot pink warm-up suit, the jacket unzipped to reveal a tight white tank top and a gold filigree necklace. Her porcelain hands sported manicured nails, polished to match her outfit. Her big hair was meticulously feathered, curled and highlighted.

She glanced at me as if trying to discern whether I was impatient. Either I didn’t look it or she didn’t care. The cashier smiled at me. She and her friend continued their conversation.

“I’ve been helping out at the shelter,” the pink gal said. “Doing some of the ladies’ hair. That kind of thing can be so important at a time like this.” She looked at me for affirmation. Her eyes turned to my wispy blond coif which was stringy from the damp air.

She pouted.

“Is you-know-who working there too?” the cashier asked.

“He is. He’s been making meals for the evacuees. He’s such a good cook.”

“Dipsy, you are one lucky girl.”

“Don’t I know it. Of course, there are certain formalities.”

“He’s still with that other woman?” the cashier said.

“He’s too nice to break up with her on the phone. Not that she doesn’t deserve it.” Dipsy began bagging her own groceries.

 “You gotta tell me when you two go public.”

“Gonna be soon, I hope. I think he sees her this weekend.”

“Her loss.”

“It is. But you know, I wonder if she’ll even care. He says ‘she has scar tissue instead of a heart.’ He’s just so poetic.” Dipsy’s voice rose to a squeal. She scrunched her shoulders and gave me a winsome smile—an apparent apology for her exuberance. She hugged the cashier. “Bye, y’all,” she said to me, waggling her pink fingernails.

“Where’s she from?” I asked the cashier.

“From around here. Same as me.”

“But that accent…”

“She got it from watching Mama’s Family.”

“On purpose?”

The cashier laughed. “Daisy’s a self-made woman. She’s smart. And determined. She decided in high school that guys don’t like brainy girls so she dumbed it down. All us gals teased her. I even gave her that nickname.”

“Dipsy.”

“She loved it. It fit her… persona? Is that the right word? All I know is that she had a date every Friday night. I was so jealous. But you can’t hate her. She’s a just such a sweetheart.”

The cashier rang up my last item, a cold twelve-pack of Coors. “Looks like you’ve got plans for the weekend,” she said, hoisting the beer into my shopping cart.

“I need to check on my boat. And my boyfriend.”

“In that order,” the cashier said with a laugh.

I laughed also, trying to be polite. “But first I’ve got to take some of this food to the Rio.”

“Bless your heart. I know they’ll appreciate that.”

I’d bought steaks for Dale and me. For dinner. I put them in my ice chest along with the beer and parked my car in front of the restaurant-turned-shelter.

The Rio’s wagon wheel chandeliers provided only the dimmest of lighting. Nice ambiance for dining. Depressing if you’re forced to spend your days here waiting for the flood waters to recede. All the tables were occupied. People played cards, or cribbage. Some tried to read. Volunteers in matching blue sweatshirts buzzed around the perimeter.

A grey-haired woman intercepted me. “You can put those here.” She pointed to a six-foot long folding table with ISLETON ELEMENTARY stenciled on it. I added two cases of beans and franks to the haphazard stack of donated items.

The room smelled of body odor. I was anxious to leave when I heard Dale’s voice. “Reggie, over here.” I turned. And stared.

“What’d you do to your hair?” I said.

Dale had an enviable, thick brown mane. It used to fall loosely around his shoulders, framing his square jaw.

“You like it?”

 “You got a perm.” I’d never had a perm. I hugged him and sneaked a hand through the artificial curls. It was possible to hate Dipsy.

 “I’m starved,” I said. “Let’s get some lunch.”

“It’ll have to be Chinese. No one else is open.”

I looped my arm through his and we walked out into the chilly morning.

“What happened to your car?” he asked.

“It was vandalized. Tuesday night.”

“Jeezus. Who would do something like that?”

“I have some ideas. Mickey offered to fix it but I’m going to take it to the dealer.”

Dale unhooked his arm from mine and took a few quick steps towards the restaurant. He walked inside. I caught the door before it swung closed behind him.

 “Sit here, okay?” The host pointed to a table overlooking the street.

“How about back there?” Dale motioned towards a horseshoe-shaped booth.

 “Romantic.” I smiled at Dale.

He took a seat on the left side of the table. I scooched around the center of the booth and leaned into him. “I’m glad you’re okay. I was worried when you didn’t return my calls.”

 “I didn’t know you called.”

“I swear that woman hates me.”

“Who?”

“Your receptionist? The one who didn’t give you my messages?”

“I’m sure she just forgot. Work’s been crazy. We actually got some real news in this town.” He patted my shoulder, nudging me upright. “I could use some elbow room,” he said.

I slid back over the red Naugahyde until I was facing him. My stomach growled at the smell of stir-fried garlic. We placed our order and sipped weak tea from small, handle-less cups.

“Have you been to the marina?” he asked.

“Not yet. Is it bad?”

“It’s gone.”

“Gone? What about the boat?”

“I was able to get it out. It’s on a trailer, behind the newspaper building.”

 “Thank you.” I reached across the table and squeezed his hands. “So where are you staying?”

 “At the shelter. With half the people in town.”

Our food arrived. I took the rough wooden chopsticks from their paper pouch. Broke them apart and picked up a steaming morsel of chicken drenched in garlicky oyster sauce.

“Why don’t you stay with me? At least until I can find another slip.”

“I thought of that.” Dale chased a slice of black pepper beef around his plate. His uncalloused hands were large and uncoordinated. He abandoned the chopsticks for a fork. “I called you Tuesday night. I guess you weren’t home.”

“I was in Redding for a workshop. Got in kinda late.”

“Bixby! What the hell is this?” Vernon Banks sauntered up to our table and cuffed Dale lightly on the head. The resilient curls sprang back into place.

Most people wouldn’t have spotted Dale and me in that booth. But Vern had cop eyes. “Looks like a big brown sheep crawled on your head and died,” he said. He turned to me. “You like this look?”

 “Of course. It’s au currant.”

“Maybe I should get mine done like that.” Vern took off his police cap and rubbed his thin grey crew cut. “S’pose they’d give me a discount?”

A little bit of Vern went a long way, but I liked that he was almost always laughing. Dale wouldn’t make eye contact with him. I beamed at the genial officer, trying to compensate.

“Haven’t seen you in a while, missy,” Vern said.

“I’ve been really busy.”

“Your boy here’s been busy too.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“Aw, let’s see that pretty smile again… There ya go.” He rapped his knuckles on the table under Dale’s nose. “This one’s a keeper, son.”

“Your order’s ready, Chief,” the host said.

“I’ll leave you two lovebirds alone.”

“He’s funny,” I said after Vern ambled away.

“Most clowns are.” Dale sneered. “Just look at him.”

Vern shadowboxed with a paper lantern that hung above the cash register. The host handed him a white plastic bag with red Chinese characters that I assumed said “Thank you for your business.” But it could have said anything. None of the restaurant’s patrons would know the difference.

#

The waiter brought our check on a small black tray. “You coming to the parade next weekend?” he asked.

“Lunar New Year,” I said. “I almost forgot.”

“I have to cover it for the paper, but I wasn’t planning to stay long,” Dale said.

“I’d like to go.”

“It’s supposed to rain.”

“We can sit in Sullivan’s and watch it from the bar.” The Irish pub was one of our favorite haunts—the place where we first met.

“The parade only has five entries. They’ll just march up and down Main Street a half dozen times to make it seem like a bigger deal.”

“So it’s provincial. C’mon. You have to make your own fun in a small town.”

“I guess you’d know all about that.”

I squinted at him. “After living in Chico, yeah.”

He exhaled heavily through pursed lips. His gaze, at first plaintive, turned fierce. “I drove up there Tuesday night. I was wet and cold and tired and I needed a place to stay. I went to your apartment but you had company.”

 “Just Mickey.”

“I thought you were done with him.”

“I was. I am. What happened last fall was a mistake. I told you that.”

“But you’re still seeing him.”

“I’m not seeing him,” I said. “He’s my best friend—”

Dale placed his forefinger on the center of his chest, his mouth agape.

“At work,” I said. “We hit the bars on our way home from Redding. I invited him for dinner because we needed to eat.”

 “I saw you with him. On your balcony.”

“Grilling burgers.”

 “Don’t bullshit me. I thought I’d need a garden hose to separate you.”

I laughed. Dale didn’t.

“It was harmless,” I said.

“I don’t believe you. Not about Mickey. Not about anything. Hell, for all I know, you’re still screwing half the guys in your office.”

I shrugged. “We never said we’d be exclusive.” My voice seemed small.

He slumped back, arms crossed. Silent. The sound of someone trying to control his temper. I missed the Seventies, when no one expected monogamy.

“It hurt to see you with him,” he finally said.

“Guys don’t hurt.”

“The world according to Reggie.”

 “It’s true. And besides, feeling hurt is a choice. People only hurt you if you let them. I figured that out in the tenth grade.”

“When your boyfriend raped you.”

“You’re over-simplifying. We were just fooling around and things went too—”

“You told me he forced himself on you.”

“Only that first time.”

Dale ground the heel of his palm into his forehead. “And that guy in college? Idiot?”

“Eliot.”

“Whatever. He just kept you around to impress his fraternity buddies. Until he could finish med school and marry a nice Jewish girl.”

 “She is nice.” I poured some tea and gathered my thoughts. “All I’m saying is once I learned men only want one thing I never had to feel hurt about it again.”

“Do you know how insulting that is?”

“Not you. You’re different. You’re more in touch with your feminine side.”

“That’s not funny.”

“You used to think it was.” I tinkered with my chopsticks, trying to balance them on the edge of my plate. “Most men only want sex,” I said. “I have strong empirical evidence.”

Dale smiled and shook his head. “When we got together I thought, what’s this beautiful woman doing with me? You fed me, gave me a place to stay, put gas in my truck.” His voice cracked. “You took care of me like no one ever had.”

“Because I love you.”

“I don’t think so, Reggie. And that’s the one thing I really needed from you. I’m sorry. I don’t think you’re capable of love.”

A lump formed in the back of my throat. I extinguished it with tepid tea and contemplated the dragon painting on the wall—its red and yellow body coiled and contorted. Its fiery tongue aimed at Dale’s head.

“Guess I’ve got scar tissue instead of a heart.”

He shifted in his seat. It was satisfying to watch.

I reached for the check but he slapped his hand on it. The black plastic tray rattled and flipped upward, sending the fortune cookies to the floor.

“I got this,” he said.

#

I challenged the 55-mph speed limit on the way home. Dark clouds rolled in from the west, like the inverted surface of a roiling ocean. I felt a combination of relief and sadness.

The office Christmas party was coming up. The organizers, tired of trying to get everyone together during the holidays, had moved the event to late February. They’d decorate a tinder-dry tree. My boss would dress as Santa. We’d exchange gag gifts. After dinner, there’d be a DJ and dancing. I’d been looking forward to having a date this year. Without Dale, I’d have to find some guy on the fringes of the gathering. Chat him up, take him home. The only way to keep from feeling alone in a crowd.

My face felt heavy. Inside my hollow chest a teenaged girl sobbed, her tiny shoulders convulsing. I gripped the wheel, taking deep measured breaths. Trying to replace the air that she was sucking out of my lungs.

BIO

Renee S. Jolivette is a retired engineer with a fiction writing certificate from the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. Her work has appeared in The Union, Current, Cruisin’ News, Microfiction Monday, Bronco Driver and Portage Magazine. She lives in Northern California’s Sierra Nevada foothills with her husband and their small but authoritative dog, Rascal.










My Speedo

by T. B. Meek



         The text came in at 12:22 in the morning. “I have ur cat. The $$ is now $200.”

         Miriam had been unable to sleep that evening, it had been three days since Speedo scampered out the door of their third-floor walk-up and hadn’t returned. It wasn’t the first time the black cat with a white blaze across its face and one white paw went on a “walkabout” as Miriam and Charles affectionately called it. The first time he disappeared Miriam was riddled with angst and emailed the neighborhood listserv at 4:30 in the morning, “Our cat Speedo has gone missing. Have you seen him? We are worried sick. If you see him, please call.” She included her cellphone number and attached her favorite picture of the pet, which was the embodiment of kitty cuteness, though the creature’s piercing green eyes probed the viewer as if the cat knew the beholder’s deepest, darkest secret. Later that day, the McFadden’s son, home from college on a laundry run, found Speedo batting around a balled-up paper bag in the basement. To thank the boy, Miriam and Charles invited the young McFadden up for a brunch of vegetarian black bean chili crowned with poached eggs and hollandaise along with Miriam’s personal pride, home cured lox on bagel crisps with whipped cream cheese and chive. As Miriam arduously whisked the thick yellow sauce, the scene of Charles assembling a bagel as he listened to the boy talk excitedly about his future plans—something outdoors, urban planning, land conservation or maybe renewables—tweaked memories of the weekends that Leah would come home from veterinary school for comfort food and quiet. She laughed inwardly for a second because Charles always overloaded his bagel with a triple spread and a double heaping of onions with capers rolling off a teetering crown of sprouts, and then there was the two layers of her meaty, thick lox, and as usual, a good portion of it ended up in his bushy beard. She was about to do a subtle chin point behind the boy’s back but paused in mid motion as a hot tear welled up and made its way down her cheek and into the hollandaise.

         More overnight “Where’s Speedo?” disappearances happened, but the cat always returned the next day for his mid-morning feeding, and seemed to be eerily cognizant that Wednesday, Friday and Sunday, were sardine days as he’d always be there waiting in the kitchen for Miriam, excitedly purring and crashing into her legs, nearly tripping her as she tried to fork a pungent headless filet into the cat’s bowl. As Speedo escape days became more and more, the mode of which, the stealthily trailing of a pant leg of an unwary resident, delivery person or anyone else operating the heavy wooden door that closed with creaking, achey slowness, Miriam and Charles began to fret less, often sharing a glass of crisp kosher white wine and laughing about, “Speedo being Speedo.” “He’s out saving the world,” Charles said one night as he sipped wine and noshed on crackers crowned with a diced mixture of Miriam’s lox, capers and pickles. To Miriam’s non-reaction he reiterated, “I’m serious, I think he morphs into a giant crime-fighting kitty.”

         Miriam took a long sip of wine, savored the buttery oak sweetness for a contemplative beat, and then nodded in reluctant agreement.

         “See?” Charles said, perching forward in his chair, “I’m telling you, it’s a thing. What do you think his superpower is?”

         Again, Miriam regarded the question with pause and said, “Laser beam eyes and saber claws, or maybe, he can command other cats as allies like the rat girl in ‘The Suicide Squad’?”

         “A giant starfish and Jim Ignatowski with Christmas tree lights popping out of his head? That movie was utter poop!” Charles bellowed. “Superhero films are ruining cinema.”

         “So says the grown-up man who collects kewpie dolls.”

         “They are trolls! Trolls are not ruining film!”

         ***

         Normally Miriam slept with her iPhone in sleep mode but that night she left it on in the hope that the ding of an incoming email from the listserv would bear good news. When the text came in, Miriam immediately poked Charles in the back and turned on the light.    

         Charles ripped off his eyeshades, put on his glasses and sat up, “What’s going on?”b

         “It’s about Speedo,” she said holding the phone up to his face.

         “Did you post your number on the flyer?”

         “And the listserv and Nextdoor. Call them.”

         “Now? It’s 12:30 in the morning.”

         “They just texted, call them,” she implored and dropped the phone on her husband’s chest.

         “Alright,” he sighed wearily and dialed the number.

         After three rings the phone picked up. “Hello, hello, hello,” a thick Eastern Bloc accent said with a flourish of maniacal merriment.

         “Do you have our cat?” Charles asked flatly.

         “But of course. I give tomorrow. You send two hundred now and then I text you where to meet.”

         “How do we know you have our cat? How did you get this number?”

         “My friend, I show you, you don’t worry.”

         “The reward posted is one hundred dollars.”

         “I show, you send two hundred, I tell you where, you send two hundred more, then you get your ket.”

         “But that’s four hundred dollars!”

         “That is the deal. You take, you leave. Up to you,” and with that, the phone clicked off.

         “Probably a scam,” Charles said tossing the phone into the puffy in between of the white duvet.

         “How do you know?” Miriam protested.

         “I mean c’mon, that accent, the way he says ‘ket,’ he might not even be in the country.”

         Miriam started to open her mouth when the phone vibrated and emitted a muffled hum. On the screen, underneath a grainy picture of a black cat, taken top down from the backside, was a single word, “Proof!”

         “Do you think that’s him?” Miriam asked as Charles enlarged the picture and rotated the phone.

         “Hard to tell, could be any black ‘ket,’or some rando picture off the internet. I don’t see his white paw, but I’m not sure that I don’t either.”

         “Let’s just pay him.”

         “And we’ll be out two hundred dollars?”

         “It’s Speedo,” Miriam said, and then more softly, “and Leah.”

         Charles sighed. It was a bitter cold day in February when the call came in. Miriam heard Charles’s phone ring in the other room as she carefully extracted the potato kugel from the oven amid the moist wafting juices of roasting chicken on the rack below. It was Leah’s favorite meal. As she pulled the foil snugly across the Pyrex pan, she tried to pull the words from Charles’s soft murmurs, but to no avail, so she quieted herself. In the still of the kitchen there were nothing but the soft whine of the oven fan and the drip of the faucet she had asked Charles to fix numerous times. Then, from the other room there was a sudden, muffled pop and the sound of glass skittering across the floor. Miriam stiffened. Heavy, lumbering footfalls made their way across the apartment. In the doorway, Charles, a portrait of clash in his his flannel robe, baggy sweatpants and plaid button down, appeared looking drunk, unsteady and holding onto the door jamb in an effort to remain upright.

         “What?” Miriam asked as she registered the tight, tremulous contortion on his face.

         Six months after the accident, Miriam became insistent that they get a pet. “We’ve already created a sizable adoption fund in her name,” Charles said. “We’ve never been pet people, that was Leah.”

         “But I want to do something, something I can put my hands on, something I can feel everyday.”

         “You could volunteer at the shelter.”  

         Miriam shot him a sideways glance. “I could, but that’s not what I am talking about, and you know it.”

         “Well, our options are limited in that the condo docs restrict dogs, birds, reptiles and other animals deemed ‘exotic,’ which oddly includes Guinea pigs and other rodents.”

         “But Leah had Charlie and Mickey and then that cute albino rat that I was dead set against.”

         “Fergie. I knew back then, but some rules are meant to be bent, plus when Leah kept asking for a dog, I spoke to Burt about it. He said he and Rach would be cool with it, but before we moved in, Jimmy Mac had wanted a puppy, and Rosemary was a hard no.”

         “Well she’s gone,” Miriam said of the former first-floor resident who Burt often described as, “NIMBY entitlement gone off the rails.”

         “All I’m saying is we should think about the time commitment and care requirements. As you recall, those piggies were a real chore to clean.” His wife seemed not to hear him. “What I am trying to say,” he said in a louder tone, “is that we should work within some boundaries if this is something you really want to do.”

         At the MSPCA-Angell Center, the Levys were warmly welcomed by a wiry blonde-haired woman who introduced herself as “Shel,” and again as “just Shel,” when Charles asked what it was short for. “Your funding has allowed us to expand our food, and spay and neuter assistance programs,” she said as she led them to a sterile conference room with a coffee urn and a stack of sugar-coated crullers at the center of the table. “Last week we were able to supply a farmer out in Fitchburg with hay and grain relief for his starving livestock.”

         “Doesn’t the farm sustain itself?”

          “In theory, yes, but this is a sad situation, tainted runoff from a development killed the grass, there’s back taxes and no new generation to pass the farm onto. The animals will likely need to be moved, though we remain somewhat hopeful as the GoFundMe campaign we launched has money trickling in and our social media team is cranking up the dial.” She clicked the top of her pen and placed a clipboard on the table. “As I understand it, you’re interested in adopting an indoor pet, is that correct?”

         “Yes,” Miriam said extricating a cruller from the Jenga heap.

         Shel sat patiently and took notes as Miriam expressed her desire to not have anything that could get out of a cage and disappear into the walls. Low-maintenance and self-sufficiency were essential. “Sounds like a rabbit or a cat,” Shel said double checking the clipboard. 

         “But a rabbit just sits in a cage, right?” Charles asked.

         “No, they can come out and hop around your living room or sit in your lap as you watch TV or read, but you have to rabbit-proof the room.”

         “Rabbit-proof?”

         “Make sure they can’t get to electrical wires—we don’t want an electrified bunny—and if you have a thick ply rug, they may gnaw on it thinking it’s grass or hay. Let’s take a walk, sometimes you see an animal and it sees you, and you just know.”

         Charles shrugged, “Sure.”

         In the rabbit room, Miriam peered through the thin metal bars of a cage. There appeared to be nothing inside, so she leaned in. Something stirred amid a large mound of hay. Ears shot up. It was a large grey buck that looked at Miriam with modicum of curiosity before thunder-hopping across the hay-lined floor and crashing into the bars. Mouth agape, Miriam let out a short, inarticulate yelp and staggered backwards, one hand instinctively pressing against her clavicle.

         “That’s Mr. Peanut,” Shel said.

         “Salted or unsalted?” Charles asked adding a sheepish laugh.

         “You don’t feed rabbits peanuts,” Shel said matter of factly, “just greens and veggies.”

         Once the color returned to her face, Miriam peered into a few more cages. There were plenty of brown and white rabbits, and some near albino, with pronounced pink ears and noses. Despite their varying colors, all the rabbits shared the same big, black, soulless eyes, which unsettled Miriam. One plump, fluffy rabbit lounged at the front of its cage, its soft fur tempting her to imagine running her hand through it as it sat calmly in her lap. But overall, they all seemed to share the same inert, aloof demeanor. The ones lingering at the back of their cages appeared to be in a state of perpetual fear, their midsections pulsing rapidly as their tiny hearts raced.     

         “They certainly poop a lot,” Charles observed.

         “It’s not so bad, it’s mostly green matter, and they can become quite tidy, choosing one corner of the cage to use as a loo once acclimated and settled in. Would you like to hold one?” Shel said gesturing Miriam toward a cage.

         “Oh,” Miriam said, “I don’t know, perhaps on the way back?”

         As they left the rabbit room, a black cat shot past them in the hallway with a young, boyish woman in blue MSPCA scrubs chasing after it. The cat raced down the hallway and into the main reception area with the woman’s sneakers making squishy squeaking noises as they ran after the animal that seemed to intentionally taunt its pursuer, pausing, allowing them to close the distance and then suddenly darting off again.

         “All part of the care giving process,” Shel commented nonplussed with an outstretched arm.

         Shortly thereafter, as they continued down the endless hall, Miriam heard the faint squishy squeak of those sneakers and then felt something suddenly brush between her legs.  She froze. What ever it was, brushed her leg again. Glancing down, the wayward cat was doing figure eights around her calves.

         The young woman’s athletic shoes made a high-pitched screech as they skidded to a sudden halt. “There you are Joe,” they said as they reached for the cat which scooted to the back side of Miriam’s legs to avoid capture.

         “It’s Ok Alex,” Shel said, “I’ll get him.”

         “He’s got a will of his own,” the younger woman said handing Shel an open tin of cat food and a spoon with an oily brown lump on it.

         When the younger woman left, the cat relaxed and rested its haunches on Miriam’s well-worn flats. She looked at Shel and shrugged.

         “He seems to like you,” Shel said handing Miriam the spoon, handle first.

         “Pheromones?” Charles asked.

         “Who knows,” Shel said, “Cats are very emotionally intelligent animals.”

         The cat sat there expectantly like a curbside passenger looking for their late arriving Uber. Miriam gingerly presented the spoon to the cat, who regarded it cautiously at first, sniffing it and then taking a tentative lick the before taking a sizable bite of the brown mushy lump. When the last greasy smear from the spoon was licked clean, the cat affectionately crashed into Miriam’s leg and began to purr audibly.

         “What’s its name?” Charles asked.

         “We’ve been calling him, ‘I Dunno, Joe,’ because that’s what the intake person called him when asked his name by a fellow staffer filling out the paperwork.”

         Charles arched his eyes and held out his hands.

         “He was found in the back seat of a cab,” She continued. “The cabbie had no idea how it got there and said he didn’t recall anyone getting in with an animal, so the thought is that when someone got out, the cat snuck in. The point is, he doesn’t have a name he responds to so you could call him anything you want.”

         Back home, Miriam scrolled through her iPad looking at digitized pictures of the family in happier times. “I want to name him something that reminds me of Leah,” she said when Charles suggested they simply call him Joe.  Miriam sniffled and daubed at the corner of her eye as she swiped and poked. “Oh,” she said tilting the iPad towards Charles, “remember our summer getaways at Sunapee?” Filling the entirety of the eleven-inch screen was a picture of the three of them in a canoe with Miriam awkwardly perched in the middle. She swiped again and the three were on a dinner cruise, and then atop a rock outcropping of one of New Hampshire’s Presidential Mountains with a vast green forest in the background. She slid again and they were lounging and reading in the living room of a rustic cabin dominated by a stone masoned fireplace framed by a roughly hewn wooden mantle, and then sunset dinning on the back deck. Then there were the shots of Charles and Leah making goofy faces as they jumped off the dock and into the lake’s dark waters. Miriam laughed uncontrollably at the next picture of Charles on the dock in a red Speedo, hips thrust towards the camera, expressive hands by his sides showcasing the tight garment, his slightly furry belly hanging over the waistband with an own-it, “Boo-yah!” expression on his face.

         “My Speedo was a great and glorious annual tradition,” Charles said of the infamous swimming garment he had initially purchased with serious intent.

         “You wanted to be like Mulder,” Miriam smirked making reference to the paranormal FBI investigator on the sci-if series they religiously watched together on Sunday nights while slurping Miriam’s beloved matzo ball soup, “but you looked more like a young, cutely chubby Seth Rogan, though I did love your appropriation of that poem.”      

         “An appropriation of an appropriation,” Charles clarified, “Duchovny ripped off William Carlos Williams’s ‘My Red Wheelbarrow’ which was both funny and shameless at the same time.” He paused and then launched in,

                  “My Speedo

                  So much depends upon a red Speedo

                  Covered with rain…

He paused again. “Now I can’t remember if there was more or not, I’d have to ask Lord Google.”

         “But you added something about vanity and Duchovny‘s sex addiction claim.”

         “Right, a goof of a silly spoof,” Charles cleared his throat,

                  “My Speedo

                  Look at me so pretty in my red Speedo

                  So much depends upon me and my flaming libido

                  Washed in rain, don’t call me vain

                  That’s just your hating ego.”

         In the wee hours of the morning Charles performed a reverse Google search on the image of the cat with Miriam hovering anxiously nearby. “Im not sending the money if this is some stock image from the internet or Granny Nana’s cat Paws from Ames, Iowa,” he said.

          When no real hits came back, he said, “Ok, let’s do it. We’ll give it a shot. It’s a fool’s errand but…”

         Charles texted the number asking where and how to send the money, and where and when they would get Speedo.

         “8AM tomorrow. Send the 1st 200 apple pay to this number, then I tell where.”

         Charles hesitated but did as requested. The next three minutes felt like an eternity as Charles and Miriam stared at the phone trying to will a response. Finally, text capsule popped up with the numbers “42.3539, 71.1373–go here.”      

         “What’s that?” Miriam asked.

         “I think they’re geolocation coordinates.”

         “What?”

         “It’s like a street address.” Charles pounded away on his laptop. “Looks like it’s a shopping mall over on Everett Street in Allston.” He showed Miriam the map. “We’ve driven by it a bunch of times, it’s a rundown stretch of urban wasteland waiting to be paved over and built up.”

         “So, we go to a shopping mall and…?”

         “Hope.”

         “I don’t think I can sleep.”

         “Me either, this all feels so invasive, like you know you’re being taken advantage of and you’re just letting it happen.”

         Miriam did eventually find sleep with the aide of a Xanax. Charles meanwhile stayed up and posted to Facebook the “The Ballad of Speedo,” which was a witty bit of acerbic humor that outlined the whole ordeal and concluded with, “If you don’t see a post here from us by 10AM, call John Wick.” He included the picture of Speedo with his probing eyes as well as the grainy image of the cat sent by their tauntingly aloof texter.

         Charles brewed a pot of coffee as the sun came up. Miriam entered the kitchen bleary-eyed, glasses askew and her thick curly hair kinked and frizzy. “Anything new?”

         Charles handed her a mug of coffee with Papa Smurf on it. “Nope.”

          “Let’s get there early just to be safe.”

         “Right. I think I’ll mount Leah’s old GoPro on the dashboard and let’s have our phones on record.”

         “Aye, aye captain,” Miriam said and issued a sleepy salute. “Phasers set to stun.”

         Checking his laptop, Charles noticed he had three Facebook notifications. One was from a former publishing colleague who triumphantly claimed they had just completed the first draft of their memoir about living in a West Bank settlement. The other two were responses to “The Ballad of Speedo.” The first from Frank Kashner, Charles’s foodie friend who was forever searching for the best fried chicken and St. Louis ribs in town, and always overjoyed to discover new joints serving such desired victuals. “Don’t do it,” Frank wrote, “call the cops.” The other was from Liz Rush, a college friend of Miriam’s who lived in Columbus, Ohio and was one of Miriam’s bridesmaids. “This is just terrible, hopefully all is well for Speedo and you two.”

         Liz had also texted Miriam, “You guys, Ok? Anything I can do?” Miriam didn’t know how to respond so she didn’t.  

         With weary trepidation Charles and Miriam loaded into the aging metallic silver Honda CRV pockmarked with bumper rubs from aggressive drivers trying to cram into too small parking spaces on their narrow, cluttered street. Charles used a suction cup apparatus to mount the GoPro between two of the many mounted kewpie doll trolls that adorned the dashboard of the car they affectionately referred to as “Old Betsy” and punched the coordinates into his iPhone. “Head south on Vassal Park Lane for 200 yards and then turn right onto Wright Street,” the cheerful GPS AI voice chirped. The AI sent them down Mass Ave and through Harvard Square, which normally it would avoid, but It was early enough on a Sunday morning that the somnambulant throng of coeds that would soon bring all moving traffic to a grinding halt as they foraged for bagels and eggy hangover relief, were still in bed sleeping off their weekend revelry.  They turned onto JFK Street and then began the slow rise over the Anderson Memorial Bridge, a point in many a journey that Charles usually pointed out that the bridge connecting Cambridge to Boston was the point of no return for Quentin Compson III in William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury,” a fact, he claimed few knew, even if they had been forced to read the shape shifting southern gothic as part of their educational evolution. “People don’t care or are just too lazy make the connection. I bet half the people who see the plaque think it’s real,” he said of the gravestone like epitaph affixed to the bridge memorializing the fictional Compson III (1891-1910). The ringtone of Spinal Tap’s “Big Bottom” came from Charles’s phone as the countenance of Frank Kashner, reddish, greying beard and piercing turquoise eyes, flashed on screen. Charles put the phone on speaker. “Frank, what’s the good word?”

         “Good word, are you crazy?”

         “Probably.”

         “Are you in your car going to meet this creep?”

         “That’s the plan.”

         “Stop and call the police now.”

         “Nah, we go, we hope.”

         “You think that’s wise? Where you heading? I’ll meet you there.”

         “You don’t have to, this’ll be over in 30 minutes or less.”

         “Will it? You don’t know who this guy is or what he wants. I’m getting in my car now. What’s the address?”

         “Allston, the shopping mall on Everett Street.”

         Charles heard a car door slam and an engine turn over.

         “Ok, I’ve got you on speaker and am going to stay on with you, just in case.”

         “Thanks,” Charles said as he reached over and squeezed Miriam’s leg gently.

         “That area’s a real shit hole.”

         The Honda jerked and bucked as it hit a pothole. “Yup, the old New York Bus Stop Diner is all fenced off and looks ready for razing. The whole place is pothole minefield, and it doesn’t help that old Betsy has shit for suspension.”

         “Your destination is 1,000 yards ahead on the left,” the GPS ‘bot announced.

         “Looks like we’re here,” Charles said as they pulled into a litter-strewn parking lot surrounded by construction fencing cordoning off adjacent properties in various stages of razing.

         “I’ll be there in 10.”

         “You have arrived at your destination,” the GPS ‘bot added as Charles paused the car in the middle of the mostly vacant parking lot. At the far end loomed a Star Market grocery store. To their left was a drive thru McDonald’s and a boarded-up Mr. Sushi restaurant that stood alone from the rest of the connected mall front like two shipping containers randomly dropped in a vast sea of tar and concrete.

         “I’m thinking over there,” Charles said pointing to the derelict sushi bar.

         “Ok,” Miriam said hesitantly, “what are we looking for?”

         “That’s a good question.”

         Nestled aside the eatery adorned with a lime green seaweed motif and boarded up windows, Miriam and Charles sat in silence scanning the parking lot for any sign of movement. Besides some distant activity in front of the supermarket or the occasional squeaky rattle of cart wheels as an employee tracked down an abandoned shopping conveyance, all was quiet.

         “Just about there,” Frank said from the phone now wedged between Charles’s thighs.

         “We should do something,” Miriam said.

         “Right,” Charles said as he extracted the phone and texted their tormentor, “We are here.”

         It took a few minutes that felt like hours, but finally a reply came, “Send other 200.”

         Charles looked at the phone, mouth agape with incredulousness. “That’s not the deal,” he wrote, “Give us the cat and I’ll send the $$.”

         “What’s he saying?” Miriam asked.

         “Wants the money first,” he said and tossed the phone onto the dashboard, the iDevice lodging between the legs of a pink and a blue haired kewpie.  “Total BS.”

         “What just happened?” Frank asked over the speaker.

         Charles quickly retrieved the phone, “Sorry. Frank, I’m going to put you on hold.”

         “Ok, be there in two.”

         Charles dialed the number and waited for what seemed too long of a period of time.  There was no ring, just dead digital silence and then, as Charles had feared, came the aurally chaotic crescendo of a disconnected tone.  He sighed and collapsed back into his seat. “Totally played.”

         “Here’s Frank,” Miriam said sitting up and pointing at the approaching gold Acura coupe dipping and bouncing across the uneven tarmac, the kewpie troll Charles had given him visible in glints as it dangled and bobbed from the rearview mirror. 

         Standing in the crisp cold between the two vehicles, Charles shrugged sheepishly. Frank closed the distance between the two and gave his friend a firm, one-armed, lean-in hug. “Zip?”

         “Total scam.”

         “Probably doesn’t have the cat. You put up fliers, posts?”

         “Around the neighborhood, on the local listserv and Nextdoor,” Miriam said as she zipped up her jacket and joined the two thick bearded men.

         Frank gave Miriam a hug, “Sorry this isn’t under better circumstances.”

         Through the billowy windbreaker Miriam could fee lean ribs and a musculature she was not formerly aware of. “You’re quite the fit one these days,” she said as they released.

         “Training for the Pan Mass challenge. It’s amazing how much weight falls away when you ride over 150 miles a week. But hey, that’s the life of a bored, retired bachelor with nothing else to do. Definitely not for the faint of heart.”

         The three shared a laugh.

         “Zaftig’s?” Charles asked.

         “Let’s.”

         At the popular Coolidge Corner deli dour in decor and adorned with what Miriam always described as tchotchke art, the three sat in a cramped booth, Miriam and Charles arm to arm on one side with Frank looking relatively adrift in his own sea of green pleather across the way. Wafts of onions and griddle grease commingled with the pervasive scent of dark roasted coffee as busy servers flew in and out of the kitchen. Before them lay a spread of knishes, potato pancakes, berry drizzled blintzes, toasted bagel halves, a plate of lox, onions, and capers and a mound of chopped, pickled whitefish at the center of it all with Mise cups nestled in between, brimming with various whipped schemers.

         “You really should consider calling the cops,” Frank said.

         “It’s just two hundred bucks, besides what would they do? Give us lip service about priorities and manpower? Speedo’s prolly still out on one of his famous walkabouts and will come home to us when he’s damn ready. That cat has always had a mind of his own and we bend to it.”

         “Charles,” Miriam said pointing to her chin.

         Charles dabbed a napkin to his beard and examined the result. “Didn’t you know, I was saving that berry sauce for dessert tonight?”

         Taking note, Frank executed a similar precautionary wipe. “It’s amazing what you sometimes find nested in there.”

         “The brotherhood of the beard, a true labor of love,” Miriam said raising her mimosa glass. Charles hoisted his splatter-stained mug of coffee and Frank followed with a garishly gigantic Bloody Mary made even more ridiculous by the towering pompadour of celery. As the drinking vessels converged the soft clink of their brief consummation was barely audible above the cacophonous din of garbled voices, clanking silverware and the continuous thwapping of the heavy kitchen door.

         “To Speedo and a safe return,” Frank said.   

         They all clinked again.

         “I know we joke,” Miriam said, “but I still have that nervous feeling.”

         “Same,” Charles said and gave his wife a soft kiss on her brow, his beard leaving her glasses askew in the aftermath.

         “That thing,” she said with a half tremulous laugh as she straightened her opticals.

         A faint mellifluous ding rolled up from under the table. Charles straightened up and extracted the cellphone from his pocket.

         “Is it him?” Frank asked.

         “Yeah, now wants three hundred. Says, ‘Your lack trust now cost more. Send and I tell.’”

         “Well, there you have it. Stop dicking around and call the cops.”

         “Funny thing is the text identifies the sender as Gracie Alves.”

         “Yeah, and?”

         “She,” Miriam interjected, “was a former house cleaner of ours.”

         “Maybe she’s in on the scam?”

         “I don’t think so, she moved back to Brazil before the pandemic. Had sick parents, though she did turn her business over to one of her workers, but we don’t use them anymore.”

         “Give the number a call,” Frank said holding his hands palm up by his shoulders. “I mean, why not?”

         Charles tapped the phone, listened for a while and then put it on speaker for the others to hear the acrimonious disconnected tone.

         “Likely masking,” Frank said. “Wonder if they hacked you or someone else. In these dark days of dirty laundry and personal information strewn all over the internet, it’s like Pac-Man chomping out there.”

***

         As Charles and Miriam were about to turn onto Vassal Park Lane, an oncoming cab made a curt, preemptive left.   

         Charles tapped the horn. “And no signal either! Don’t people signal anymore?”

         Miriam looked at her husband with a steely eye. “Just let it go.”

         But he didn’t. His agitation mounted as they rolled down the narrow side street, the cab slowing and braking every ten yards as the driver’s head craned right before moving on. “And the guy doesn’t even know where he’s going.” Charles said as threw his hands up. “Ask Siri! She knows!”

         Due to its tight narrowness, two cars could not pass each other on Vassal Park Lane. If two cars met in the middle, one would have to pull into an empty parking space or one of the few driveways to let an oncoming traveler pass, and if no option was available, one would have to back up, which often led to honking and shouting, especially when other cars added to the impasse.  Often Miriam and Charles would peer out their window with knowing bemusement, but when these uncivil moments played out in the middle of the night, they put in earplugs and grumbled about a letter to the city requesting that their cozy side street be turned into a one-way.

         In the moment however, a one-way passage would not abate Charle’s impatience as the procession jerkily made its way past the smattering of stately Victorians, the tight row of brownstones and small sitting park formerly named after a colonialist who made his vast fortune off the backs of slaves. It was now called Mind’s Eye Park, the name suggested by the biotech entrepreneur who, when he and his family moved into one of those grand Victorians, paid for the Stonehenge-like art and rustic benches hewn from tree stumps. The street name however, long a topic of city council debate as part of the ongoing mandate to remove the names of those who perpetuated slavery from city landmarks and commemorate those who were subjugated and endured, retained the name Vassal, not because it commemorated John Vassal, but because, as one council member articulated, “it elevated the inspirational spirit and persevering will of Darby Vassal,” one of John Vassal’s slaves who became a freeman, activist and religious leader. “Had they called it Darby Lane or Darby Vassal Lane, that would have made sense,” Charles had said at the time taking exception to Jeet Shiva’s preemptive, money-pushed agenda that shut others out. “He’s a godsend for the neighborhood,” a neighbor had posted on the listserv when he had his gardener install planters full of picturesque flora around the neighborhood, but that communal affection ebbed after the park’s controversial renaming. When the city had first announced the rebranding and long overdue renovation, Charles had wanted to make a little fairy and troll house out of the old tree trunk that had remained a ghostly spectacle decades after a lightening strike robbed it of its carbon cleansing ability. “Children can come and play and have a sense of wonderment,” Charles beamed at the prospect when budgets, artists and designers were being discussed by the council, but then Jeet stepped in and opened his checkbook.

         The park faded from view as they drove into the neighborhood of triple-deckers where the Levys lived. This part of Vassal Park Lane, in particular, faced significant parking challenges due to its proximity to Massachusetts Avenue. That stretch was home to two contentious marijuana shops and a hub of eclectic eateries attracting visitors from the suburbs. People flocked to Jin’s Fine Asian for its house-made soup dumplings and La Mediterranean for its green crab-infused seafood dishes. The main attraction, however, was Giuseppe’s Table, a Michelin-rated restaurant where the line for haute nouvelle Italian cuisine formed around the block an hour before opening. Another notable spot was Big Paul’s Southern, known for its gas station cuisine, which gained popularity after Paul’s two-episode stint on “Top Chef.”

         The strip also boasted essential Indian cuisine, two homemade ice cream shops, and a vegan café that had become a mecca for yoga enthusiasts seeking healthy meals after their sessions. A recent addition to the area was a pricey, “proudly woman-owned” wine bar and art gallery serving tinned fish and imported French cheese. As always, Paddy’s remained a classic college hangout and sports bar, also hosting live music and poetry slams. It had been a fixture on the strip long before the subway line extended to the area and had weathered the rising real estate prices brought by gentrification.

         Parking became even more complicated on Sundays, when the city allowed all spaces on Vassal Park Lane—normally reserved for permit holders—to be open to anyone. This policy meant that Charles and Miriam had to carefully secure a parking spot for Betsy on Saturday before sundown, leaving her parked there until Monday morning.

         To Miriam’s eye, the shadowy passenger in the backseat seemed to be a woman by the updo hairstyle adorned with hat had to be chopsticks or pencils sticking out. “Oh here,” she said pointing to her right.

         “Nah, I see a better one right up in front. Now if this guy would just get along.”

         But he didn’t, the flashers came on and the cab stopped adjacent to the empty parking space.

         “Great,” Charles said, and palm smacked the steering wheel.

         “Just back up and get the one back there.”

         Charles put Betsy in reverse and began rolling backwards until a loud honk brought him to a stop. His foot hard on the brake, a large black SUV loomed in the rearview.  They were boxed in. “Nothing but those knishes is going to go right today,” Charles muttered to himself and gave a little double tap on Betsy’s horn. 

         “It’ll be just a minute, let’s just let it be,” Miriam offered sympathetically.

         “I’ll see your two-hundred and raise you fifty.”

         “What?”

         “Never mind.”

         There was movement in the back seat of the cab as the passenger began to duck and bob. The rear trunk popped, and the large SUV gave another long leaning horn blast.

         Charles threw his hands in the air. “Wonderful, just forking wonderful!”

         The rear passenger door flew open and out stepped a tall dark-haired woman in a long flowing floral dress and sporty, waist-cropped black leather jacket. To Miriam, she looked like a model, angular, aloof, and instantly captivating. With quick efficiency the woman adjusted dark sunglasses that framed her porcelain face, swung a large black purse over her shoulder and then rounded the back of the cab, but before she got there, the driver, a short bearded man, head wrapped in a turban, shot out of the driver’s side and was there before her, digging down into the cab’s abyss and extracted a sleek silver toned piece of luggage. The horn from the SUV blared again.

         “Bloody hell,” Charles said, “I’ve got half a mind to…”

         The cabbie turned toward the SUV and made a slow, exaggerated hand wave. Then, with the calm precision of a BBC broadcaster, he said, “My friend, it is only time. Time we can share. Time you can afford. Be kind to all and kindness will come to you.”

         The SUV, its windshield as dark as its paint job, revved and lurched and then flew up Vassal Park Lane in reverse. Charles watched with daunted amazement at the driver’s seamless skill but then his appreciation turned to horror as the SUV didn’t even pause when it dumped out onto Oxford Street, cutting off another car. More horns sounded, engines growled, and then there was silence.

         Trying to find calm and refocus, Charles noticed the woman was nowhere to be seen and the cab was now at the end of Vassal Park Lane where it made a languorous left and disappeared.

         “So much drama,” Miriam mused. “Who do you think she was? I’ve never seen her before.”

         “Who knows. Maybe a visiting professor? People come, people go.” Charles put his index finger in the corner his mouth and flicked it out, making a loud pop. “Ok,” he said, “Back to our regularly scheduled program,” and with that, he slowly but adroitly pulled Betsy tight to the curb, her bumper just inches the McFadden’s prized Tesla.

         As Charles joined Miriam on the sidewalk, he noticed his wife was frozen, staring down between the navy-blue Tesla and a city worn Toyota Corolla with a tattered “Co-Exist” sticker on its rear bumper. Her finger was pointing, and her lips quivered, but no words came out. Charles followed the path of her finger and there, emerging from the front of the Tesla and onto the sidewalk was Speedo. Neither of them moved as the cat nonchalantly sauntered between them and up the stairs of their building.

         “Well, well, well,” Charles said with a soft chuckle that made his belly jiggle. “All’s well that ends well.”

         Slowly, Miriam followed after the animal, her eyes burning and heavy and moist, her gait unsteady.

Taking stock of Miriam’s state, Charles hurried after her. Halfway up the stairs a foot missed a riser, and she stumbled backwards. A hand shot out for the railing but missed, and she began to fall until firm arms secured her around her waited and righted her. They stood awkwardly on the stairs facing each other, each with a foot on a higher and lower riser.  She looked at her husband long but said nothing as the tears continued to well. When she became overwhelmed she crashed her face into his soft chest, as he gently put his arms around her, his beard enmeshing with her frizzy free ringlets.

         “Where have you been boy?” Charles whispered aside to the cat who sat nonplussed by the door licking the one white paw. Convulsing waves of grief poured into him in rhythmic intervals.

         Finally, Miriam pulled back, eyes red. She placed a soft hand on his cheek and then with one arm firmly around her, they slowly ascended.

         “Were you out saving the world with your laser beam eyes?” Charles asked the feline who regarded him indifferently, its piercing eyes shooting right through him. “You had mama and me so worried.”

         “It’s like he doesn’t even know us,” Charles said softly into his wife’s ear.

         “But he’s back,” she said blankly.  

         Charles opened the door and held it ajar. “Nothing sardines won’t change.” The invitation did not move the cat, its eyes were now fixed on Miriam.

         “Shall we all go in?” Charles said with an arm wave gesture of and usher.

         The cat gazed over its shoulder at the man for a brief second and then suddenly lurched forward and into Miriam’s legs rubbing against her and purring like the way he did when their souls first fused.



BIO

Tom Meek is a writer living in Cambridge. His reviews, essays, short stories and articles have appeared in The Boston Phoenix, The Boston Globe, The Rumpus, Cambridge Day, The Charleston City Paper and SLAB literary journal. Tom is also a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics and rides his bike everywhere.







The Wedding Cake House

by Amy Cacciola



            The white stucco chimney of the house next to my childhood home has a hole in its side the size of Santa Claus, and every Sunday when we visit my parents, my two boys point in wonder to the men hanging from the scaffolding who are taking it apart, piece by piece. In a few weeks, the original wood beams of its frame are bared and by early December, when the men begin to tackle the roof, my youngest worries out loud, “But how will Santa Claus park his sleigh there?”

            “There aren’t any children living there yet, remember, Danny,” I reassure him, as we all troop into his grandparents’ house, my husband, Bill, reluctantly following us in.

            Sunday is the day for family visits, the day for small home repairs and computer advice, and for helping to clean out the attic in preparation for my mother’s death—an event for which she’s been preparing without specific cause for years. To the boys I just say, “Grandma wants to make more room for you to play,” and I load them down with boxes of my prom dresses and high school yearbooks, loop them into their great-grandmother’s hand-crocheted scarves until I can barely see their eyes, and send them back to the car like little Michelin men while Bill escapes with my father into the backyard with a can of paint. Like me, my dad can’t bear to throw away his past. “Goddamn Marie Kondo,” he’ll say, jutting his chin towards my mother. “She’d burn everything to the ground if we let her,” and so we’ve both developed the habit of checking the trash before it goes out.

            “I guess he bought the house for the land,” I remark as my mother and I linger on the front stoop, where despite the cold her geraniums thrive in oversized pots, one per step. It’s an orderly block, with lawns trimmed like neat goatees in the summertime and Christmas decorations that never overstay their welcome. Although there are no rules governing what color you can paint your house or how late your kids can ride screaming through the street on their bikes, you will see couples slow down by the Wedding Cake House on their evening strolls, remembering the man who built it for his new wife, to commemorate their love, and shaking their heads over what’s become of its snow-white frosting. I suppose the demolition of any landmark draws two kinds of observers: those who witness its death almost bodily, feeling the thousand paper cuts, and those who thrill to the possibility that it will go up in flames. I’m firmly on the side of Mrs. Murray, who walked away with a layer of stucco curled in her palm like the body of Christ, but this means I’m not on my mother’s side, which is never a comfortable place to be.

            “Syed says he wants the chimney to be shorter,” my mother explains, gazing up at the hole with one hand shading her eyes and a concentration very like that of a bird-watcher who believes she has spotted a rare robin. Her eyes are a particular shade of blue gray and they have always registered everything. Although she must be nearing eighty, she has never worn glasses. When we were children she would send my sisters and me to the front of the line at the DMV to read the very smallest letters on the eye chart, and today when I struggle to read the fine print on my father’s medication she tells me that she doesn’t need reading glasses. Her vision is perfect. She sees Syed in the distance and waves. We’ve been here before, and as with every man who has had the misfortune to move into a house beside, before, or behind hers, I know that Syed will soon see her fascination for him fade into disgust. Men with big plans—men with the tools and the muscle and the money to build a perfect home—become over a series of months (one time the honeymoon was as long as a year) men who throw garbage down from the roofs and who operate heavy machinery that gets too loud. So loud it feels as though it’s your house, not theirs, that’s being torn down. But today, a Sunday so clear and cold the nuclear bloom of each layer of falling stucco hangs in the air for several minutes before wafting away—today we are still in the early stages of love. Water is on offer on the days the plumbing has to be shut off, and there are cookies to be delivered once they have cooled. A bag of summer tomatoes dropped off on a neighbor’s doorstep, a parcel of mail delivered when they return from vacation, these are the kinds of good deeds one expects of good neighbors, and in return there are paths forged through the snow during winter blizzards and heavy pieces of furniture moved from one room to another—things my father can no longer do and for which my mother seems to view him, witheringly, as useless.

            For the past several years now, they have spent their time in separate rooms, and I go from one to another as though visiting them in different countries. With one I sit on the couch and stare at the shelves of childhood trips chronicled in fading Polaroid shots, gently whacking my father on the knee every so often to prevent him from falling asleep while I am talking to him about the things we have in common: the sly navigation of office politics and the black-and-white films we both love—William Holden movies where the suave leading man doesn’t always get the girl. In the other room, with the girl I always thought my father married for love, I speak another language that feels thick, like cream, my tongue slick with the white lies I have taught the boys that people sometimes have to tell to keep the peace. Is it too cold in the house? Not at all. Do I mind returning her birthday sweater, or did I want her to try it on to prove how poorly it fits? No, Ma. It’s not a problem. I believe you. I help with the dishes, watching her dunk her left hand with its pear-shaped diamond ring deep into a mountain of suds, and it isn’t difficult to imagine her disappointment that the mountains that rise outside her window are the dirt mounds of Staten Island rather than the Himalayas or the Andes. But people don’t get divorced in their seventies, I tell myself, feeling like a small child for the first time in years, as upset as my son is at the thought of Santa not being able to land on the roof. Perhaps all of childhood is a fairytale we tell ourselves, but there’s no time for self-pity. There’s the crack of my eldest’s voice, breaking at the very top notes, reminding me that I’m the mother now and demanding that I follow him down the dank basement steps and into the light of the yard, where the sound of the house next door flapping its tarps in the breeze like a duck shaking out its feathers is like a slap in the face, and there on the very top step of a two-story ladder is the man I married two decades ago, scraping at the flaking paint of several years of weather coating, his own coat flapping in the breeze as well. It’s his good wool coat, paired with his good dress shoes, and he looks annoyed when I suggest he might slip or wreck his loafers, probably because he thinks I care more about the shoes.

            “Paul, go hold the bottom of the ladder,” this whispered to my eldest, knowing that it won’t fool his father in the slightest. Using children as my secret emissaries is probably on the list of things I share with my mother that he hates most, along with a too-practical nature that can weep over someone’s death and in the next moment inquire about their will. We all have our flaws—his being that he says yes to everyone, as though he lives to serve, which is how he ended up on the top of this ladder.

            “I don’t want you to fall,” I say, I still don’t want you to fall, I think, and my father takes my hand in his dry one for a moment. When he drops it, he does what he always does with his hands when he wants to make a point, rubbing thumb and forefinger together like a magic trick to make them sound like something being tightened, like something hard that will never break.

            “I tried to do it myself, when your mother asked. It was on her list. Don’t let her know what happened. Don’t let her win,” and he shows me the root of the tree that tripped him, mimes how he lay on the ground looking up at the white sky through its black branches, ten minutes, twenty minutes. He kept his wits about him, “Had my phone on me. Almost called you,” but after a while got up and said to himself, “You’re all right.” I ask about bruises; get him some pain medicine from the bathroom without letting anyone see what I’m doing; tell him to take a hot bath; and then Danny comes outside with his grandmother in tow, and we fall silent. For the first time I’m grateful that there are men working next door, making noise and speaking in at least two different languages. Even on a Sunday, there are probably ten of them ferrying rocks and dirt down and out to the dumpster.

            “He’s built-out the back room all wrong—the angle’s not ninety degrees. That’s going to cost him,” my father says, the general contractor in him calculating the extra time and labor needed to rip it out and redo it. All those years in the bowels of the New York City subway system have left their mark. He can only hear well from his right ear, and his left shoulder is slumped like the concrete he slumped and tested, and slumped again until he knew it was strong enough to hold. We all sit down at the picnic table in rocking metal chairs that have retained the dry fall leaves in their nooks and crannies, and make crunching noises as we rock. There is no snow.

            “It’s not so bad, building something at ground level,” my Dad remarks, not needing to explain how important light would be to a man who spent so many years underground, nor that these men can point to the house as something they’ve accomplished without having to drag their children to the back door of the Number 1 subway train as it went by mile marker 6572. “There’s where I chipped out the tunnel and built it back up.” To my mother, the new structure is all about progress. Gone is its frumpy, stubbly white skin and in its place are smooth planes that catch nothing, not even the rain, which bounces off them like fat sizzling in a frying pan. For the past couple of years, the construction has been the only thing my parents have come together to talk about, and it’s momentarily comforting to see them rallying back and forth about the color of the ornamental shutters or the shape of the hand-hewn stones that have replaced the asphalt driveway. They both like black. They both hate octagons. There were years when they both loved each other.

            “Why don’t you let me show you around?” my mother offers now that the men have begun to pack themselves into Syed’s truck, but I don’t want to go inside a stranger’s house, and besides, it’s nearly time to go. Bill is rocking nervously in his chair, his hand in his pocket over his phone, which he knows better than to take out; and the boys are playing with a huge stick in a way that’s likely to end badly if we don’t leave soon.

            “It’s not like I’m asking you to do something illegal. But if you don’t want to go, of course I wouldn’t want you to do anything that makes you feel uncomfortable. I was only going to show you the fireplace Syed put in last week,” she says, a master at the passive-aggressive guilt trip. That bag of tomatoes was my job to deliver, the mail my sisters’ to collect from front porches that creaked with ghostly emptiness. Taking the tray of cookies from her, I fall effortlessly back into the role of emissary. Why she has a key is unclear, since the men have their own, which they use to let themselves in to wash their hands at the kitchen sink or in the downstairs bathroom; their dusty footprints are captured on brown paper paths taped to the floor leading to each. The rest of the house is an empty, echoey maze of pine studs, and we lay the tray down in the kitchen on top of an open framework that will probably turn into an island grilling station. In the middle of this geometric maze, my mother looks small but somehow at ease.

            “The top of the island will be black marble,” she says, spreading her hands out over the wooden beams so that I can almost imagine the cool stone pooling out in smoothed waves.

            “Don’t you love the clink of a glass set down on stone?” she asks dreamily, but I’m a little distracted by the pitch of the ceiling, thinking that my father’s right about the structure, and through the side door, I’m also keeping track of my sons, who have ditched the stick in favor of a game of catch with their father. The ball boomerangs in that perfect curve of give and take, father and son, adult and child, and I’m so awash in nostalgia for a past that’s not yet past that I haven’t even noticed the tour hasn’t yet ended.

            “All stainless, Syed says, for the appliances. And we can have the pool you always wanted—the one your father said would make the backyard collapse into the ravine behind the house.” She pauses, her eyes very blue again. “You know, the only reason we went to Jerusalem was because I convinced your father to go there. You should see him talking with Syed, always about how much he loved seeing the mosques, as though it was his idea to go there.”

            For a moment, I’m confused. We’ve talked so many times about how nice it would be if they threw caution to the wind and finally got a pool for the boys, since we don’t have room for one where we live. When I join her at the back of the house to peer into the ravished yard, she points to the spot where a kidney-shaped hole half filled with concrete takes up most of the garden, and the “we” begins to sink in. Part of me wants to believe that she’s only pointing out what could have been, but I follow her train of thought back to Syed, whose new house with its multiple bathrooms will enable his family to purify themselves before prayers. It’s not hard to imagine that at the end of a fifty-year marriage, the places you wanted to go become more important than the places you went, and the traits you thought you could shape into something else remain stubbornly unchanged, like a block of marble that reveals the same figure no matter how you chisel away at it.

            “We’ll go to Riyadh first, to visit his parents. To Mecca of course, to say our prayers.”

            Perhaps my next questions should have been to ask what year it was or the name of the current president of the United States. But we’d just talked about him and the anger had risen in both my parents—the blue Democrat’s veins bulging and the Republican’s neck flushing red. Instead another memory comes of the woman who moved into the Wedding Cake house to serve as a companion and nursemaid to the wife, after the man who built it had died. We’re standing in front of the fireplace she has brought me here to see, before which lie two tasseled rugs arranged for prayer, and the ease with which she sinks down onto one of them—at her age—into a cross-legged position surprises me no more than her familiarity with the space.

            “Do you remember that night, so many years ago, when the shade snapped up in the living room window? I think it was that one right there, and we saw the two women kiss.” This was long before such a thing was commonplace and the women, two Irish Catholic biddies with long gray hair, were the kind who never missed mass. But my mother isn’t listening. She is twisting the key in her hand, and she’s getting up and motioning that it’s time for her to lock up.

            It’s started snowing and Danny is bawling on the couch next to his grandfather. Paul caught more balls than he did and his father wouldn’t let him help carry the Christmas tree down from the attic, nor help to set it up in the living room where my father has cleared a spot for it by moving the potted plants he brings in every winter so they don’t die.

            “Danny, if you just calmed down, I’d let you put the branches in the holes, but I don’t think you can see where to put them with all those tears blurring your vision …” There’s a fig tree, the kind the Italians usually wrap in burlap and leave outside but which we’ve found does pretty well indoors, and some palm trees that don’t like snow. My mother bustles around with the ornaments, and more boxes of old toys from the attic, which she’s piling up at the front door for me to take. There’s a box of clay pinch pots from grade school, some Mother’s Day and birthday gifts that I object to having returned but decide to keep my mouth shut after she explains, “Don’t you want the boys to see what an artist you were when you were little?” She’s busying herself with a box of file folders that need to be rearranged to fit into it and on top of which she carefully places a much-folded wad of papers from her apron pocket.

            “Your original birth certificate,” she announces, “your sisters’ too. And all your school records,” gesturing towards the box with one fluttering hand as if to say, now you can take it away.

            “So many things in the attic that I don’t need. Swedish death cleaning,” she says, just out of the boys’ earshot. “The Swedes got a lot of things right.”

            “So, apparently, did the Arabs,” I shoot back, but the comment is lost in the flurry of goodbyes and the packages, which Danny protests is the reverse of Santa Claus.

            “You’re not supposed to give presents back!”

Later, getting ready for bed I recount the whole experience to Bill and he laughs, telling me we’ll know soon enough if she’s getting ready to die or to move out.

            “I did see a suitcase in the hall …” And he repeats what he’s always said about her. That she’s a woman ripe for conversion to any religion whose hold on its followers is stronger than hers.

            “But it’s not about faith,” I argue. “I’ve never known a more devout Catholic, despite the fact that that she seems to be heading to Mecca.”

            “Isn’t it, though? What do you call it when you reject your entire past if not a crisis of faith?”

            As he sees it, she’s injured me far worse than my father. Rejecting their marriage isn’t that big a deal, even at her age.

            “I mean, they don’t see eye to eye on anything except that house. Splitting up would be a good thing for both of them.”

            But rejecting her children, even symbolically, even in “crazyland,” was a step too far.

            “Poor little orphan,” he croons, spooning me in bed and brushing his hands through my hair. “Poor motherless you.”



BIO

Amy Cacciola’s work has been featured in Marrow Magazine, Epiphany Magazine, and Roger Rosenblatt’s podcast, Write America. In her blog, Me, Moon!, she played second fiddle to her sassy, five-year-old daughter as they debated everything from the walking speed of sloths to the origins of Trump’s family separation policy and the meaning of death. She is a graduate of Vassar College and Columbia University, and lives in Brooklyn. www.amycacciola.com







When the Circus Came to Town

by Deepti Nalavade Mahule



My birth mother ran away to join a circus when I was around six months old. Daddy told me this and added that even though I’d always known that she’d gone away, now that I’d turned fifteen, I was old enough to handle the details of her leaving us all those years ago.

Perhaps recent happenings in his life — his cousin’s recent fatal road accident, getting laid off from work, taking up drinking but then turning sober — had hastened Daddy’s decision to tell me this new information now.

Many years ago, Daddy had sat me down and told me for the first time that my birth mother had left us when I was a baby. I’d scrunched up my five-year-old face in confusion. “What do you mean by ‘gone away’? I’d pointed to Mumma, my stepmother. “But she’s right here with us!”

As the years went by, I had more questions which Mumma, my stepmother, said she couldn’t answer, and that Daddy only partly managed to. Daddy said that she’d left one day when he was at work, and he didn’t know why. Then he’d end the conversation with, “Meera, you have both of us parents who love you and that’s all that matters now.”

Still, my questions kept piling up. As the years passed and my quizzing became complex, his face would turn red, and he’d avoid my eyes as he mumbled his answers. Her name was Mohini. She’d left one day leaving a message saying only that she was never coming back. No, he hadn’t kept that note. And he had no idea why she’d left. Did I resemble her? He couldn’t say because he thought he wasn’t good at identifying such things. What did she look like? He couldn’t really describe her, and he hadn’t kept any of her photographs. Her own family had cut her off and he’d never kept in touch with those people. Now, could I stop with the questions? There was really nothing more to say.

One time, when I approached him with yet another question about my birth mother while he was catching up on office work at home, he cut me off with a snarl. “Not now Meera. Can’t you see I’m busy?”

I persisted and that’s when he erupted, screaming at me to leave him alone, almost smacking me before I jumped out of his way. On hearing his raised voice, Mumma came running and took me aside.

“Your Daddy is a sensitive man,” she said. “Please don’t make him upset by asking about her. Especially when he’s stressed about his work.”

Lips quivering, I nodded and gave in to Mumma’s embrace. Her hand stroked my back and little by little, my questions didn’t feel as pressing as they did before. Although we talked about my birth mother occasionally, over the past few years, there was less and less to say about her. And so, Daddy’s disclosure about her running away to join the circus felt as though a claw had ripped a tear in my life with one sudden swipe.

It can’t be true, I thought. But his grim face told me that it was.

We were sitting in my room, and outside the window, the sun made its descent behind the trees in front of our apartment building. Patches of light and shadow moved across Daddy’s forehead. The severity of his frown made his mustache droop, giving his face a sad yet clownish look.

“It was like a trick being played on us when the family elders forced our arranged match. Although your birth mother and I had a big age gap and didn’t have anything in common, she thought we could make our marriage work, even though cracks had started to appear, which only I seemed to notice at first. She got pregnant with you, after which she finally saw how we were failing each other. Then, nothing I said or did would agree with her. My appearance, manners, clerical desk job, salary — everything irked her. In her eyes, I became a loser.”

He looked out at the darkening shapes of the trees and continued in a strained voice. “I learned that she’d been good at sports during her growing years and would sneak out to ride horses belonging to a rich family. Whenever the circus was in town, she never missed seeing it and sometimes went twice or thrice in a single week. During the few months before she ran away, she had begun to leave you with our neighbor who ran a daycare to spend time in the afternoons at the circus that camped on the outskirts of our town. After your birth, she’d sunk into depression and that was the only thing that seemed to give her any joy. At home, she tried to copy what she’d seen there.”

“One evening, I came home early from work to find all the clothes taken down from the clothesline and her trying to tightrope walk on it, falling often but giggling to herself as she got back up. Another time, in the middle of the night, when I went into the kitchen to get milk for our crying baby — for you — there she was, juggling three oranges in the light of the moon coming through the window.”

“And then one day, she ran away to join the circus,” I repeated, as if in a trance.

Daddy raised his shoulders and dropped them in a defeated shrug.

“Even her name — Mohini — was so theatrical. Suited her just fine.”

He sighed and continued speaking. “One day while I was at work and the neighbor had taken you out for a stroll along with the other children under her care, she went away with the circus as it left our town. The note she left behind said that she was sorry, but the circus was her life, and being part of it was in her blood.”

He shook his head as if still in disbelief. Then, his face softened.

“Not long after I signed the divorce papers and handed them to someone who she’d sent to collect them, something wonderful happened.” He gestured toward Mumma, my stepmother, sitting silently beside us all this while, and he smiled. “This lady took one look at you and said that she wanted to marry me.”

Mumma took my hand in hers and stroked it. Her smooth skin was a few brown shades darker than mine, and her black hair was silky in contrast to my curls. She had thin arms and delicate wrists, very unlike mine. I withdrew my hand from her grasp. Mumma winced but I pretended not to notice. The bitterness that had stayed with me after our fight a week ago over buying me a cell phone chafed against my heart even as all that I’d learned about my birth mother sunk in.

That night I lay curled up in bed in the dark with a picture of one-year-old me in a flowery dress, chubby-cheeked, and chunky-thighed, sitting up and looking at the camera with questioning eyes.

‘Baby rabbit’ — Mumma called this version of me, and as I closed my eyes, I saw a little animal alone in the forest at night, twitching its nose, trying to catch its mother’s scent after she’d left it behind in their burrow. Tears dripped onto my pillow into a growing patch, wet against my cheeks. A circus, of all things! Mumma had known all this time and hadn’t told me.

I stopped crying only when I heard muffled voices outside my closed bedroom door. Then the door opened. Mumma’s breaths filled the quiet of my room while I pretended to be asleep. Her nightgown rustled as she went out, but the scent of her freshly applied almond hair oil lingered in the air. I scrunched up my nose. I decided that I’d never really liked that smell.

“I told you, Sujata. Meera will be ok. She’s tough. Like me,” I heard Daddy say.

I scoffed at his words. He calls himself tough. Even after how he’d almost given up after being fired from his job.

“Yes, she’s asleep. I had to make sure she was ok before I went to bed,” Mumma said softly to Daddy, closing the door behind her.

If she cares about me so much, I thought, then why did she refuse when I requested a cell phone for my birthday?

My anger boiled up, releasing itself into a scream that I stifled into my pillow. Mumma had said that Daddy and she would think about getting a cell phone for me next year, after my current school year — an important academic one that would decide junior college admissions — was over. It was maddening that I’d have to wait that long when all my close friends already had one. I bristled every time they looked up from their lit-up phone screens, chuckling together at some joke from shared messages. The other day, I stupidly waited alone for a whole hour at a café and nearly wept in public because they’d changed plans at the last moment but couldn’t find a way to notify me. No amount of my cajoling and crying would budge Mumma’s decision. And if she said no, Daddy would never say yes.

I woke up the next day, adamant about remaining closed off from the people in my house. Before all of us left home — me, for school, Daddy, for a job interview, and Mumma, for the dental clinic where she worked as a receptionist, as she hovered around me, my eyes fell on her black and gold necklace symbolizing her marital status. I imagined her fifteen years ago entering my father’s life, a guest stepping into a home and taking up residence in it forever.

“Meera, talk to me,” Mumma said but the words seemed to be stuck in a maze inside my head, unwilling to come out.

You refused to give me what I want, so stop asking me if I need anything else, I felt like saying to her, but I bit my lip and shook my head.

In the evening Daddy prepared to leave for Mumbai where he had to stay for two days for interviews. He put down his suitcase at the apartment door and came toward me with outstretched arms. I leaned awkwardly into his embrace and turned my forehead away from his spiky mustache hairs.

“Are you ok?” He asked.

How could you let her run away to join a circus? I wanted to shout.

“Yes, I’m ok,” I mumbled instead.

He released me from the hug and nodded as if convincing himself of something. Then he went into the kitchen, and I watched him through the gap in the doorway and the kitchen wall as he pulled Mumma close to him. My face grew hot. They never showed physical affection in front of me. I looked away, a thought blooming in my mind, had Daddy ever tried to ask my birth mother to come back for me?

Daddy and Mumma had met when she started a job at the office where he worked. Mumma had lost her parents when she was a little girl and was taken in by poor relatives belonging to a low caste. When they couldn’t afford to keep her, she grew up in an orphanage. She later spent the rest of her student years at a boarding school on a scholarship.

Even after years had passed, Daddy’s relatives whispered among themselves. “Sujata — that sly darkie! She never had to worry about money or anyone having to arrange a match for her after she got our vulnerable Vivek properly ensnared.”

Those words lurked in the shadows of my mind, and now, parts of them stepped into the light. Perhaps Daddy had been so enamored with Mumma that he’d never bothered to look for my birth mother and to ask her if she wanted to see me.

I went into my room and tried to do my algebra homework, but nothing made sense. Despite my questions in the past, Mumma hadn’t told me about my birth mother running away to join the circus. If asked, she would have said that it wasn’t her place to tell me and repeated what she always said about Daddy being a sensitive man. I sat staring at my notebook, tapping my pen against my desk, listening to the sounds of Mumma working in the kitchen, feeling as though a stranger were moving about in our house. If Mumma hadn’t been there, would Daddy have tried to find my birth mother for me?

Soon, Mumma called out, “Meera, dinner’s ready.”

As soon as I went into the kitchen, she said, “You haven’t said much after what Daddy told you about your, uh, birth mother.”

When I didn’t say anything, her face fell. She took a deep breath. “This might bring you peace.”

She handed me a piece of paper, which looked like a ticket. In big black curling letters at the top were the words “Golden Circus” and below it, “Admission for 1” with the next day’s date and time for the 1.30 p.m. show.

“It’s leaving next week. Your mother works there.”

I stared at the ticket in disbelief. 

“Don’t tell Daddy,” Mumma said.

That night, I dreamed about the baby rabbit moving through a leafy forest. Branches shot out in all directions, forming a spiraling green tunnel. I reached out to pick up the rabbit and soothe her but the closer I moved, the farther she leaped away, sniffing the air for her mother’s scent. Finally, I turned around and began to run in another direction, a path I was certain about taking, only to wake up with beads of sweat on my forehead. I put a hand on my heaving chest.

I lay awake for a long time and when it was morning, I told Mumma that I would try to meet my birth mother after the show got over. Sitting through the performance would be too nerve-wracking, and I was afraid that I would run away even before it got over.

Mumma’s eyes lit up when I told her that I’d decided to go. “A patient at our dental clinic said that the star circus performers meet with audience members outside the main tent after the show. Your mother, part of a troupe of popular acrobats, will be there. Ask around by her name.”

It seemed to me as though she had purposely not said my birth mother’s name. She spoke briskly, the way she did when she oversaw anything we did in our household.

“I’ll drop you off near the main tent and go to Anita’s house to wait for you there. You can take a bus back to her house.”

Anita was Mumma’s best friend who lived near the circus grounds. I was relieved that I would be meeting my birth mother alone. But what was I going to say to her? A million ideas crowded my mind — from simple greetings to direct questions about why she left me. I sat down on the edge of my bed with my head in my hands. Finally, I decided that I would state who I was and wait for her reaction. When it was time to leave, I slipped the picture of baby me into my handbag and went into the living room with a low ache thrumming steadily at the sides of my head.

Mumma was waiting for me by the door, wearing a plain outfit and with her hair in a simple braid. Always well-dressed and wearing makeup, I’d rarely seen her ready to go out with such minimal effort on her appearance. Noticing her slow movements, I wondered if she, too, had poorly slept the night before. As she zipped up her purse, her fingers shook.

“Ready?” She said, handing me my wallet.

Her eyes fell on my t-shirt and her lips curled into a tiny smile. I realized that I had put on the green shirt that she’d gifted me on my recent birthday.

“Don’t worry. Everything will be ok,” she said and squeezed my shoulder. Her hand was clammy with sweat.

We set off, Mumma weaving her scooter through traffic, me in the backseat, digging my nails into the leather. The few morsels from that day’s lunch that Mumma had insisted I eat felt as though they were churning inside me. When we stopped at the traffic lights, I almost jumped off and ran home.

My birth mother had left me once long ago. She was going to leave me again, wasn’t she? In all this time, had she ever attempted to look for me? I thought. It was foolish to go looking for her. And yet, I couldn’t fight against it.

As we drew closer to the venue, the striped, red conical top of the circus tent came into view above the tree line that ran around the circumference of Laxmi Maidaan — a wide expanse of ground, which hosted sports matches, exhibitions, fairs, and now, Golden Circus.

Mumma parked her scooter outside the gate, and I got down, my eyes on the cavernous opening of the circus tent, inside which flashed bright lights. The accompanying music reached a crescendo and was followed by applause. A booming voice on the microphone began to announce something. The show was about to end.

“I’ll be at Anita Aunty’s house. You know which bus to take from here,” Mumma said.

“Yes, I’ll be there,” I said and willed myself to walk in the direction of the tent. My headache had become a swinging hammer around my temples.

“Meera, wait.”

I turned around. Mumma came toward me, wearily rubbing her eyes with the palms of her hands. Her face looked worn. The furrows on her brow and the lines around her mouth stood out in the bright afternoon light.

“If there’s a problem, you know my phone number, and you know Anita Aunty’s number. You’ll manage to contact us somehow, right?” She said, trying to put her hand on my shoulder.

I shrugged her off, seized by a spike of irritation jabbing my aching head, a culmination of the anger that was gnawing at me over the last few days.

My words came out loud and fast. “So, I must worry about how to contact you? If you’d got me a damn phone, this could have been taken care of easily.” I paused to catch my breath before delivering a final stinger. “I bet my real mother would have been better at giving me what I want.”

I sensed Mumma recoil as I hurried away without looking at her. Blinking away tears, I made my way through the crowd that was spilling out of the tent opening and stopped behind a wooden partition next to the ticketing booth near the main entrance. The wind rose and brought with it a raw, earthy smell, perhaps belonging to dogs, horses, and a camel or two. I felt like a nervous creature myself, crouching behind a clump of bushes in the forest. After a few minutes, the circus troupe began to come out to stand by the entrance to shake hands with spectators and pose for photos. Heart pounding, I scanned everyone’s faces.

“Mohini!” Someone called out just then and a woman in a full-length shimmering lavender and silver costume came out. My knees turned to jelly. I grasped the partition to steady myself.

She was tall and had broad shoulders. The makeup exaggerated her features, but I could make out fleshy lips, a wide forehead, and a prominent nose. I touched the similarly protruding bridge of my own nose and felt something break inside me.

I would have stumbled toward her had it not been for a small boy, about five years of age, who ran out of the tent and almost collided with her in his eagerness. The boy wore the same shiny uniform as her and had put on a red clown nose. Shaggy yellow strands of a wig fell onto his wide forehead. He was followed by a mustachioed man in a jeweled turban, clearly the ringmaster. The man laughed at the boy and reached out to hold him close, while his other arm slipped around my birth mother’s shoulder.

“Smile, please!” Someone said and the three of them grinned at whoever was clicking their picture.

My birth mother then turned to the little boy with a delighted look on her face and picked him up. She nuzzled her nose into his neck as the boy beamed and put his arms around her. Then, they moved their faces closer, and — as if they did this all the time — they bumped their noses on one another and laughed.

“Mohini,” I called out her name to myself in a whisper. I felt emptied out, with nothing more to say.

I stood there like someone gazing into a fishbowl containing a family of fish, afraid to put my hand in and pollute the water. The way the boy snuggled into my birth mother’s neck reminded me of how, when I was little, I would do the same to Mumma when I was hurt, howling every time she tried to put me down. She would carry me even though her back hurt as she walked to and fro, trying to distract me from my pain. All I could think of was Mumma. Mumma kissing my forehead before leaving for work, even though I was fifteen years old. Her face appearing in the doorway as soon as she came home from work in the evening, her tiredness dissolving into a smile as she sat down in my room and listened to everything that I told her even before she drank a much-needed cup of tea.

What a relief it had been to have her there, especially after Daddy lost his job and after being unable to find a new one for almost six months, spent all his time at home in front of the television, going for days without showering or speaking more than a few words. Previously, he would have a drink or two on special occasions like birthdays, anniversaries and at times like when Mumma got a salary raise, or I got good grades, or when India won a cricket match against Pakistan, but his increasingly frequent drinking episodes had started to make me wonder each time what the occasion was.

One evening, after it had been almost seven months since Daddy was laid off, I returned late from a friend’s place. Mumma wouldn’t be home yet, and I’d hoped to sneak past Daddy who would be in front of the television, engrossed in watching a show. However, as soon as I noiselessly opened the front door, I paused in the doorway. In the darkening living room, there he was, slumped on the floor against the sofa like a drunk beggar, legs splayed out. He raised a glass clinking with ice cubes to his lips, babbling to himself. After downing it all, he banged it on the wooden table, almost breaking the glass. A bowl tipped over and roasted peanuts scattered all over the floor. On the table were an empty bottle and two halves of a cut lemon. Daddy picked up the knife that was lying there and studied its blade glinting in the light of the streetlamps coming from outside.

“What a loser,” he said in a thick voice and gave a snort.

In a flash, he swiped the knife over his left palm and watched as a jagged line blossomed in red across it.

I screamed. His bloodshot eyes widened and turned to me. When he spoke, his speech, albeit slurred, was savage enough to send a chill up my spine. “You sneaky rat! You’ll be a failure, wasting time with your good-for-nothing friends instead of studying. Do you want to end up like me?”

The hand holding the knife jerked backward and I was certain that he was going to hurl it at me. Daddy was only throwing it back onto the table but icy tendrils under my skin were already crawling up my arms and feet. Before I could stop myself, a warm trickle ran down my leg.

Someone gasped behind me. Mumma had come home. She dropped the bag of groceries she was carrying and hurried up to Daddy. Whispering urgently under her breath, she got him to his feet and guided him into their bedroom. After I’d cleaned up, she didn’t say anything to me about me wetting myself but fed me a hot dinner and kept checking on me until I had completed my assignment, which I don’t know how I managed to do considering the frozen state my mind was in.

The next day, after I woke up, I found a note from her. She’d taken Daddy out for a stroll in the hills outside our town. After they came back, he apologized profusely to me, his tearful hugs thawing out my numbness until I cried with him. He got back to job-hunting soon after and I hadn’t seen him touch a bottle since that day.

Out there in front of the circus tent, my head full of thoughts about Mumma, I turned back and became one with the flow of people heading out of the gates. At the bus stop, I was struck by panic when I reached into my wallet and realized I’d forgotten to check if I had enough for the bus fare. But my fingers pulled out plenty of notes of cash. Mumma, who’d handed me my wallet before we left, had put in the money.

If I had a cell phone, I’d have texted her a thank you this instant, I thought, and my eyes filled with tears remembering how I’d lashed out at her. On the bus, my hands shook as I paid for the ticket. When I found a seat, I peeked into my handbag at the photo I had put inside. The infant’s dark eyes shone up at me. 

“Baby rabbit,” I whispered to her, “you don’t have to search around anymore.”

After the bus dropped me off, I ran all the way to Anita Aunty’s home and leaped over the cracked tiled steps of her old apartment building two at a time. When I rang the doorbell, my ears picked out Mumma’s faint voice coming from inside the living room.

“Meera, is that you?” She asked even as her footsteps approached to open the door.

My nose twitched, as I imagined taking in the fragrance of her hair oil, and my heart lifted. Words pushed past the lump in my throat, and my voice came out in a squeak. “Yes, it’s me, Mumma, I’m home.”



BIO

Deepti Nalavade Mahule is a writer of color living in California. Her website, with links to her selected published work, is: https://deeptiwriting.wordpress.com. A piece in *82 Review was nominated for Best of the Net 2024 and another was shortlisted in Flash Fiction Magazine’s contest in July 2022.







Broke Palace

by Joe Ducato



         Skittles hurled a rock at the Snake River Bridge.  It bounced off a girder in a rousing C-sharp. Skittles had a canon for an arm.  She had even been banned from pitching in Little League because ‘her fastball was that lethal,’ they had claimed.  Skittles, though, felt her aim was true and came to doubt herself after that.  The boys walking with her swore the bridge moved. 

         ‘The abandoned always find one another,’ Skittles thought and didn’t know why.  Words were always coming to her; from where, she didn’t know.  The secret stream she called it but never told a soul.

         ‘It’s like a law,’ she finished then swept the words away.

         She had never been abandoned.  Neither had the boys. Itchy and Z.  They just felt that way sometimes, like all 16-year-olds.  Like everyone.

         “I don’t think I can do this,” Itchy confessed.

         “It’s only an hour,” Z groaned, “Everyone goes up there when they turn 16, and everyone comes back, right?”

         They walked halfway across the bridge and stopped to gaze out and over Snake River to the far hillside where Broke Palace sat alone and stoic like a dog who doesn’t know it will die.

         The massive wood structure, Broke Palace may have been broken but that didn’t diminish its greatness.  It was a true palace, and as far back as anyone could remember, had always been on the hill and had always been abandoned.  It was distinguished by a tall center gable piercing the sky with 2 shorter gables at its sides making it, from a distance, look like praying hands.  There was plenty of danger there too and enough folk lore to fill a cargo ship; stories of a faceless figure sometimes seen in a window; a figure who came to be known as The Count.  The legend of The Count fueled imaginations of the young at heart for miles.

         Skittles and the boys decided that after their hour, their rite of passage in the dark, at the Palace, they would swear forever friends.  Standing on the Snake River Bridge that day, it felt cool to be alive and more cool to be 16.

         They crossed the bridge and found the path that would lead them to the Palace.  During the steepest climb, Skittles told the boys they would spend the hour in a tiny room she’d heard about at the tip of the praying hands.  That made Itchy even itchier.  The closer they got, the more the Palace morphed into a lioness in the Land of Enormous Beasts.

         They stood at its door like ants at a pyramid.  The door was just hanging; nearly off.  A dead tree had fallen and was resting against a side wall, and the air smelled of danger. 

         Skittles tip-toed past the splintered door and into the structure.  She found herself in a huge foyer with the boys close behind.  They stopped and stood wide-eye and long-jawed.  It was a true cathedral.  They had never seen so much nothing taking up so much space.  It felt almost holy.  They had to strain their necks just to see the shadows of the upper beams.  

         Then came the flash; the white flash that happens when things turn on a dime.  It doesn’t happen to everyone, but it happened to them that day.

         There he was, standing there like a single palm tree in a desert, The Count himself.  It was the moment the needle drops on fear and the record skips, except for some reason, Skittles’ record played on.  She stood firm in the secret stream, her eyes focused on The Count.  He indeed had a face and was smaller than all the stories; not much of a count at all.  More like a favorite bus driver or a sad guy at the park.

         Itchy and Z heard a scream, although no one had screamed.  It was the scream inside your head when you’re too scared to scream on the outside.  Instincts took over and the boys turned and ran for the door, and even though Skittles wasn’t scared she found herself running too.  Six feet ran out of the Palace as if connected like the feet of a caterpillar.

         But halfway to the path Skittles stopped.  She realized that she didn’t want to be part of a caterpillar, that she couldn’t be part of a caterpillar.  The boys though, were gone, bound for Mexico, a long-distance train running through the rain.

         For Skittles, the song playing in her head played beautiful and clear.  She marched bravely back into the Palace unafraid; as unafraid as she’d ever been in her life.  She walked up to The Count.

          “You’re just a little, old man,” she mused.

         The Count turned away, then back.

         “You’re here,” he said, “Finally!  Here!”

         He rubbed his hands together.

         “I’ve tried.  It’s too strong and I’m too weak.  I’ve wasted all my long years!”

         He smiled, toothless and sincere.

         “Have you asked Him?” The Count drawled, “Have you talked with God?  Can I leave it?  Is it done – that which can never be undone?  Tell me, please.”

         Skittles noticed 2 floor boards, loosened and stacked, at the old man’s feet and empty spaces in the floor where the boards had been.

         “Did you do that?” Skittles asked.

         The Count held up bloodied hands.

          “Ask Him, please.  I’ve tried my best, but my best won’t do anymore.”

         “How long have you been here?” Skittles asked.

         “My poisoned brain won’t say.”

         He looked around.

         “Prison…”

         “Prison?” Skittles winced, “God no!”

         “God yes,” the old man countered.

         “No,” Skittles insisted, “Not a prison.  I’ve stood at my window many nights and dreamt I was here.  Not a prison.  Not a prison at all.  To me, a palace.”

         “A palace?” the old man asked.

         “Yes.”

         He rubbed the rooster skin covering his throat.

         “And shelter in the woods for the gentle,” Skittles added.

         The old man raised his hands high, shouted to the rafters.

          “I’ve tried my best!”

         Something up high fluttered its wings then settled down.

         Skittles inched closer.

         “I’ll help you put the boards back.  You can’t, not with your hands.  You’ll make them worse.”

         The old man shook his head.

         “What’s done is done.  It’s the law.”

         “No,” Skittles countered, “Not the law.”

         “How do you know the law?  So young.”

         Then they turned their heads.  The boys were back, standing in the doorway with long sticks.

         “For me, they come?” the old man asked.

         “No.  They’re my friends.”

         “Friends?”

         “Get away from him,” Itchy warned.

         “It’s ok,” Skittles held up a hand.

         The old man dropped to his knees and wept.  The boys raised their sticks.   

         “No!” Skittles shouted.

         She bent down and helped the old man up.  He started to walk and Skittles walked with him, a hand on the bottom of his elbow.   The old man stopped at a closed door, faced it like it was a lion’s den.  Skittles pushed the door open, unveiling a dark, empty room. 

         “Did something happen here?”

         She gestured to Itchy who dropped the stick, pulled a candle from his pocket, and a lighter, lit the candle and brought it to Skittles, avoiding eye contact with the old man, then shuffled back to Z and picked up the stick again.

         The Count stared into the room.

         “Heart of darkness,” was all he said.

         Skittles placed her hand over the old man’s hand.  She could feel the dried, crusted blood.

         “He’s crazy,” Z whined.

         The Count turned to Skittles, stared at her young face.

         “Love dies,” he said then lowered his head.

         “No,” Skittles said, “Nothing ever dies.”

         “How do you know, so young?”

         That was the moment.  The moment Skittles knew where the words came from.  She looked down.  Her feet were in clear water, in the stream, surrounded by large stones with words written on each stone.  Skittles read those words aloud.  She knew then, her aim was true, that it had been true all along.  Her forever friends watched in awe.

         “We build,” she said, “It’s what we do.  Sometimes the ones we build for don’t, won’t or can’t stay and we feel like our home has been abandoned, but no home is ever truly abandoned.  Someone you may never know may have placed dreams there, maybe a little one who was lost and no longer is because of what you’ve made and you never knew it, never knew what good work you did.  Leaves fall in patterns we don’t understand.  Only the One who made the woods knows why leaves fall and land how they do.”

         “Wow,” Z turned to Itchy.

         The boys lowered their sticks and joined Skittles and the old man.   

         Skittles slowly entered the room, leading with the candle.  Orange dancers leapt from the flame and onto the walls, spreading joy and light on everything it could reach.



BIO

Joe Ducato lives in Utica, NY. Publications include Santa Barbara Literary Journal, Home Planet News, Modern Literature and Metaworker, among others.







The Last Sticky Thing

by Sirong Li



A salesman knocks on my apartment door. He says he’d like to sell me my death.

“But it’s Tuesday,” I say. “Nobody wants to die on a Tuesday.”

“People die,” he says. The fern by the doorway rubs against his dark-green linen suit. “Some on Tuesdays, some not.”

“But the sun’s not out yet,” I say. “I really shouldn’t make purchases at night. Never turns out well.”

“You don’t have to decide right away,” he says.

“Okay. Come in then,” I say. “Don’t smudge my couch.”

“I like to be clean,” the salesman says, placing his black briefcase against his thigh on my couch. “You got a promotion last week, right?”

“I did, yes.”

“In that case, it’s best for you to die now.”

“But the sun’s not out yet, really,” I say, sitting down across from him. “My wife tells me that the sun suffers the same way we do – you know, we all have the same desire to excrete. The sun would also burst if it didn’t relieve itself of light.”

“You don’t have a wife.”

“I could,” I say. “If I didn’t have to die so soon.”

He gently pulls his tie to clear his throat. He has thick hands and an Adam’s apple too big for a middle-aged man – for any man. He is that kind of person who, when he sneezes, makes the metal around him resonate. I go into the kitchen to get him a glass of ice water.

“No, thanks. I burp with ice water,” he says.

“I remember I used to have stomach issues as well,” I say. “Got me into the hospital later. How old was I?”

“Four years and six months,” he says. “How do you want to die?”

“I had a near-death experience once,” I say. “One time, I was certain that there was a cut on the back of my hand, but I felt nothing. It made me feel dead. A few days later I realize it’s a piece of dried red pepper. That made me feel worse. Like a fraud.”

“Which hand was it?” he asks.

“Left hand.”

“And you used your other hand to take the pepper off?”

“No,” I say. “I didn’t need to. It just fell off. Like every non-sticky thing.”

“Are you still able to move your hands, then?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Are you able to close your eyes?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Well then,” he says, “if you are able to close your eyes, you are able to die.”

“Sure,” I say. “But why die?”

He touches his nose, glances at the dead orchids on the coffee table, and rests his gaze on the courtyard outside the window. It is only ten-thirty. The college kids living on the top floor have just come down for their night party.

“A good death is good,” he says. “It’s good when you die your death, before death kills you. Timing is crucial.”

“I remember what it’s like to die at the wrong time,” I say. “When people die at the wrong time, they smell like moldy mushrooms. I know at least one person who did that.”

“I’m glad,” the salesman says. “That we agree on the importance of timing. And now is time for you.”

“Now?”

“It’s all done for you now, the pleasure in striving. You’ve hit the end with the promotion,” he says. “No more striving for you. You better get out before things go downhill.”

“I do feel good these days.”

“Of course you do,” he says. “But not about death. Death is bad for your health. Too unexpected. It shocks people. We can help you with that.”

“How?”

“We will help you plan the execution,” he says. “You see, there will be no surprises.”

“So I would be executed?”

“No. Not that. I’m not the Grim Reaper,” he says. “You will execute your death.”

“Right,” I say. “So you want me to kill myself, like a suicide?”

“God no.” He suddenly gets excited. I can hear noises stirring in his stomach. “Suicide brings shame, too much for one to take. We want the best thing for your well-being.”

“Are you thinking of euthanizing me?” I say. “Is it because of the way I feel things? When I was young, I woke up every day feeling like one of those wobble toys that wobbles but never falls. That feeling was replaced by another one when I grew up, that I couldn’t get rid of: now I feel like a bigger wobble toy.”

“No, no, not euthanasia,” the salesman says. “Death doesn’t end suffering. It prevents it.”

“Not suicide,” I say.

“No.”

“Not euthanasia.”

“No. You can call it exiting, if you want,” he says. “You will exit your existence, actively.”

The garbage disposal makes a brief rattling sound. I can smell the stench of rotten apples in the sink. I stand up to open the window in the living room. The college kids in the yard outside have finished eating and started dancing. One of them eyes me. I close the window and sit down.

“So, how do you want to die?” he asks.

“I know that death is bad for you,” I say.

He nods.

“I know of a person,” I say, “the one who smelled like moldy mushrooms. He was destroyed by death. Herbicide, it was. He was killed over the course of seven days and changed his mind by day two. I visited him on the fourth day, when his lung was half fibrosed. Incredible tear glands, you should’ve seen, generating tears twenty-four hours, kept going for another hour after he’s dead. He told me he could never be happy again. That’s how I know death is bad.”

The salesman neatens his wrinkle-free suit. He would never be like me, with bits of salt from dinner always stuck under the fingernails.

“So, you dislike tears?” he asks.

“Nothing to like about tears.”

“And you are not going to cry.”

“I’m not going to cry,” I say.

“At your death.”

“At my death.”

“Have you ever seen anyone cry?” he asks.

“I’ve seen people die from crying,” I say. “The person I just mentioned.”

“Have you ever cried yourself?”

“Perhaps,” I say. “But never on a Tuesday.”

“And not when you die.”

“Not when I die.”

He takes out a document from the black briefcase and writes something down. Its front page has my name on it.

“You see, I don’t cry from pain,” I say. “The most painful thing in my life is that I always itch in my clothes. Any kind of clothes, wool or nylon, it just itches, it itches all over my body. It’s the same kind of feeling when your eyes are bloodshot. Because of this, I can’t move around most of the time with my clothes on. It’s an inescapable pain, because it’s all over the body, and you only touch more clothing if you move. But I don’t cry at this.”

He puts the document back.

“That’s because life is sticky,” he says. “It sticks to you, sticks to your inside, sticks to your surface, so when your clothes touch it, the clothes become sticky and itchy.”

“Sounds about right,” I say.

“Of course it’s right.”

“It became sticky unconsciously,” I say. “Life, that is.”

“Life, it is,” he says.

Half of the college students have left. I turn on the lamp on the side table next to me. The light wets the space around my body and does not flow to him. I have all of it and he has none.

“You thirsty?” I ask. “Would you like some whiskey?”

“Neat. Thank you.”

I get us the drink. We clink glasses. The steamy shadow under his armpit jitters. He wants to return to my preferred way to die.

“I’ve been dreaming,” I say. “Dreaming of falling. First there was a storage room, and then I fell out of it into an identical storage room.”

“Is that how you want to die?” He puts down the glass. “By falling.”

“Maybe.”

“You’ve thought about it,” he says. “Tell me.”

“Once,” I say. “I only thought about my own death once.”

“Once you know about death, you can’t unknow it,” he says. “What was the thought?”

“The most disturbing thing about dying,” I say, “is becoming a corpse.”

“Where did you get that idea from?”

“Nowhere.”

“Then how do you know it’s disturbing?” he says. “I’m curious.”

“The man I just mentioned,” I say. “You should’ve seen what death did to him. He was getting more and more stiff from day one to day seven, and eventually got turned into a corpse, left with a livid face like from chronically bad digestion. He seemed like he could never have that kind of sweet and slow-rising feeling, ever again. I mean, how could he ever feel anything again, with all the stiffness?”

“Is this because of the stiff leather chair you got in your office last year?” he asks.

“What about it?”

“It’s stiff.”

“Yeah. It is quite uncomfortable,” I say.

“I see.”

The salesman writes something down again. He takes a look at his watch.

“A very important thing,” he says. “You need to take tomorrow off. When you die tomorrow, you won’t be able to go to work.”

“I don’t know how to ask for a leave at this hour,” I say. “The front desk must be closed now.”

He takes out a business card from the briefcase and hands it to me. It has the name of the company I work for and an emergency number.

“Just leave a voicemail,” the salesman says.

The salesman walks outside and makes a call. I dial the number and leave the voicemail. He comes inside when I’m done.

“You’re in good hands.” He sits down. “Why don’t you show me around your place.”

“I thought you already knew its layout.”

“Every detail of it,” he says. “But I’d still like to see it in person.”

We go through the kitchen and then the bedroom, and back to the living room. I turn off the lamp. A sparrow chirps in the empty courtyard. The salesman turns around. The tail of dawn sweeps by his eyelid.

“It’s time,” he says.

“I also prefer daytime to nighttime.”

“I almost forgot,” the salesman says. “Would you advertise for us? This could count as your payment. We want to put your case up on billboards.”

“Does that mean I need to change?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “We’ll go up.”

We go out and get in the elevator. The apartment building has ten stories. We stop at the top floor. A young man with a camera is waiting for us on the roof. Downstairs, there is a bony old man standing in the courtyard, looking up at me. All three men are wearing the same dark-green suit.

“Don’t worry,” the young man says to me. “Our company never goes wrong when it comes to planning the best decision for one’s future.”

He seems to be talking to me, but I think what he is really doing, as he has been his entire life, is trying to figure out exactly when he made the decision to never trim his nose hair again.

“We will provide you with the best service.” The old man downstairs waves and yells at me. He is so thin that he is only vaguely present. “Plus, this afternoon we’ll throw in a free funeral for you,” he adds.

Next to the old man is a big black metal box, with a brass crank on the side.

“That is an incinerator.” The young man leans over. “You will jump down from here, and you’ll jump directly into it.”

The incinerator distorts the air upon it. The salesman comes to stand beside me.

“It’s too early,” I say. “Whenever I wake up too early in the morning, my mouth tastes bitter.”

“There are things in your life that will go away,” he says, “at some point.”

“But it’s too early.”

“It’s not,” he says. “People don’t realize that most of their problems come from living for too long. Be smart and secure your happiness.”

“But is it really necessary?” I ask.

“Are all the days truly necessary?” he says. “You are a lucky man.”

“I sure don’t feel very lucky right now,” I say, looking at the incinerator. “Is that clean?”

“Don’t worry,” the young man says. “No one’s ever spit into it.”

“I never liked diving that much,” I say.

“It’s dry,” he says. “It dries things up once it’s done. So there will be no tears, no liquid.”

“But I’m concerned about the heat,” I say. “Mold and maggots…”

“Lucky for you, you won’t be a corpse,” the salesman says. “You will instantly become ashes when you land.”

“The sticky stuff inside you will come out. But it will be gone instantly,” the young man says. “So no messiness. It’s like you are jumping directly into your urn.”

The old man downstairs begins turning the brass crank slowly. The box starts to make huffing sounds.

“I still don’t feel very lucky.”

“Don’t you see yet,” the salesman says, quickly pulling his tie. “When people die, their life is simply interrupted by death at an arbitrary point. But you, you get to conclude your life when it’s at its fullest, like a story ending after reaching its climax. You get to consummate your life, while most people’s lives are formless.”

“But it’s too cold this early in the morning,” I say. “I might catch a cold shooting through the chill air.”

“It’s worth it,” he says. “And you’ll feel like a bird.”

The incinerator sits there. Its left corner seems to bear the residue of a kind of transparent fluid. I look down – it is a cleaning gel of sorts.

“I remember when I was born, my eyes felt like gobs of glue, I couldn’t see anything,” I say. “And then there’s the clothes thing, and now this gel.”

“It’s just glossy,” the salesman says, facing the incinerator.

“But still, is it going to touch my eyes?” I ask.

“Just face the other way.”

“What if it touches my spine?”

“You won’t feel a thing.” He checks his watch. “It’s about time.”

The young man holds up his camera, gesturing for me to go closer to the edge of the roof.

“This is for the billboard,” he says. “Smile big, for the last time!”

I put one of my legs up on the brick ledge and face the sky. As soon as he clicks the shutter, the sun stings my eyes.

“Why are you crying?” the young man asks.

“It’s the sun,” I say. “Corrodes my eyes like salt.”

“Alright, now, give me a smile. A big one.”

“I can’t,” I say, “the tears are making me really uncomfortable. It’s all over my face. My goodness, now snot, and my neck. God it’s uncomfortable, makes me want to cry.”

“Should we take a break?” the young man says, turning to the salesman, who shakes his head.

“Just take another one,” he says.

“But I kind of want to pee as well,” I tell him.

“There’s no need anymore, since you’ll die in a second.” He hands a napkin to me. “It’s going to be okay. Just one picture, then you won’t ever need to deal with any more goddamn stickiness.”

I wipe off my face and turn away from the sun.

“Does the light ever feel loud to you?” I ask.

“Alright, now, give me some teeth. It’s all in the teeth,” the young man says, holding up the camera again.

This is how things are done on Wednesday mornings – I try to think about a dry surface and put on the biggest smile of my life.



BIO

Sirong Li studied creative writing and philosophy at UC Berkeley. Her work has been published in The Macksey Journal. Her two short stories were double finalists for the 2022 Tobias Wolff Award. 







BIRTH DAY

by Rosie Hart



I can feel the squeaking wheels beneath me. I can feel them in my back as I’m rolled down the hallway. The white lights overhead fly by like the lines on the road do. I’m trying to pretend that I’m in my car right now, driving with the window rolled down and the breeze in my face. Maybe Dazed and Confused by Led Zeppelin is playing from my Spotify. But I’m not, instead I’m here.

 The lights above me are too bright, and the white walls are reflecting so much of it. Why can’t they paint more welcoming colours like pinks and blues, why does everything have to be so white.

I’ve been awake for over 24 hours now and I just want to sleep. I can’t sleep through this pain, I’ve been trying. Maybe a few minutes here and there over the last 10 hours, it hasn’t been enough. Even though I have a line in my back, I can feel everything on my left side still. I could probably deal with the agony much better if it weren’t for the wicked Charlie horse I’m getting in my lower back. A 14-hour Charlie horse, imagine that.

I can’t stop weeping and I don’t know why. This is what I initially wanted, and I let everyone around me talk me out of it. If only I had listened to my gut, then we wouldn’t be here right now in this situation. At least if this was scheduled I wouldn’t have had to find out that I am a failure of a person. It feels like I’m failing a test, a life test. I’m always failing those.

“You don’t want that. It’s major surgery. You want to go the natural way.”

My doctor’s words echo in my mind from months ago. I didn’t want to go the natural route, I wanted the surgery. Today, right now, was not by choice though, not like this. The one thing I am supposed to be good at as a woman, and I failed. I hate myself and I despise my body. Why can’t I do anything right?

I need to pull myself together. It’s already been two hours since the surgery was announced. That’s plenty of time to have myself collected by now. I can’t have my baby coming, into this world with a mother sobbing on the table. He’s going to need me. He needs me now and the only thing I can think of is my ego. Imagine being a little baby boy and needing his mother, only to have her indulging in self pity and obsessing over her broken body.

I was going to fight with the doctor and plead with him to let me go for another few hours. Women always go past the 24-hour mark so why can’t I? But what do I know, I’m just a labouring mother. I can always deal with my failures in a few days time. These feelings need to be wrapped up into a box and stuffed in the corner, for now.

Does every woman have thoughts like these when in this situation or am I the only one? I’ve never described myself as a selfish person before and I don’t need anyone telling me otherwise, because I know the right answer is that I’m not. I can’t help but feel this way.

As we roll closer to my final destination, my heart begins to beat out of my chest. My shallow, quick breathing is rolling into hyperventilation. I’m shaking, I’m so scared.

I am ready for all of this to be over, I’ve been bed ridden for the last 2 months with extreme pain in my pelvis that radiates into my knees. The right one would buckle from under me with every few steps that I took because of the nerve pain. I haven’t been sleeping during this time either because I can’t get comfortable, and I struggle to turn over due to the groin pain.  

The squeaking bed halts in front of two tall swinging doors. This is it, here we are. It’ll all be over soon.

“They are ready for her.”

A nurse dressed all in teal swings the doors open and motions for us into the OR. I can see only her eyes and I don’t like that. I need to see her face, her expressions. Are her lips pursed? Is she worried for me? Is she mad at me? Did I ruin their lunch break?

“Ok honey are you ready?” The nurse from behind me is upside down. Her eyes don’t show worry. She’s not mad at me.

I wish I had another minute, so that I can mentally prepare myself for the next phase. The doctor earlier didn’t give me a minute to process the surgery before he had me sign the consent forms. I needed one hour to get myself straight. To cry it out, grieve, to shut my mind down from making up all these lies about my failures. Before I can respond I am wheeled in through the swinging doors.

This is where I die.

More white. White walls, white floors, white ceiling. Why the fuck is everything so white? The table is all set up for me in the middle of the room. My son’s basket and heat lamp are in the corner, it’s too far away from my table. I want to hold him. Why are they trying to keep me from him already? I tend to get possessive over the one’s I love, and this baby is mine. I don’t want anyone touching him but me.

The back side of the room is wall to wall, ceiling to floor cabinets. The only label I can make out from over here is HYSTERECTOMY.

Fuck.

This is where I die.

“Hey uh, I have a mole on my belly that I’m quite fond of. Can you try not to remove it when you cut me open,” Good. Keep making light. Stay focused. You want this.

“Haha we don’t cut up that high,” the OR nurse doesn’t seem mad.

“Ok, well good luck guys. You got this,” the Dr and the nurses all ponder that statement. I don’t think anyone has told them good luck before. But really, I wish them all the luck.

Breathe. Deeply. Breathe. I need to quit hyperventilating because if I don’t, once they cut me open, the blood will be pumping so fast, it’ll shoot out of my body, and I’ll be waking up in front of Heavens doors. That makes sense right? Anatomy 101? Breathe and stop crying.

“Oh uh, I’m sorry, I can’t get up and move myself onto the operating table. My legs aren’t working. Do you guys mind helping me out?”

“Haha you’re funny. Of course we will, don’t worry about a thing and just relax.”

I’m trying.

“Hi, I’m the anesthesiologist and I’m going to be right here beside you the whole time, ok? So, you already have your epidural in. We are going to run the ice test to see if you can feel anything. Can you feel this?”

“No.”

“Good, can you feel this?”

“No.”

“Good, and how about this.”

“No.”

“Good. Just a few more drugs and then we are ready.”

“Can I watch please? I want to see it,” watching always calms my nerves, I wanted to be a doctor. At least I’d have something else to focus on rather than my own thoughts that are trying to trick me.

“No, we can’t allow that, we are going to hang a drape right here in front of your face. But some women say they can see the surgery through those lights above your head.”

“Ok,” breathe.

“I’m going to be right here with you,” says the anesthesiologist as he grips my hand. Sir, please don’t let go of me.

Breathe. In. Out. In. Out. Stop sobbing. There. Good. Just breathe.

“Alright so we are going to begin cutting now.”

The OB doesn’t seem worried. He sounds like he’s done this before. I hope he’s done this before. His bedside manners could use some work but that’s how you know you have a good doctor, I guess.

I can’t tell if they’ve started or not, I can only hear the clinks the instruments make against the metal table. I wish I could see what was going on because then I would know where we are at. I hate not knowing things. How many layers have they cut through already? How much time has it been? Are we there yet? I am totally and completely blind in this surgery right now.

Everything around me is becoming blurry and the tunnel vision is starting. At least if I pass out from fear I’m doing so on an operating table. The drips in my hand hurt with every tremble of my body. My stomach is so hard I think I might throw up again. This isn’t fair.   

A painless pressure the size of a small bowling ball slowly builds up inside of my belly and begins to roll around, yet contained within my very swollen abdomen. I hope the angry nurses whose lunches I ruined, aren’t washing their dishes inside of me, because that is exactly what it feels like. Maybe they are hands actually, I can’t tell because no one will let me watch. This bowling ball is alive, I know it is, it’s trying to escape out of me. It keeps pulling my belly up and I’m afraid it’s going to pull me off the table.

“Ah well would you look at that. He’s all wrapped up in his cord. See here nurse, look he’s wrapped here, around his neck and his shoulders.”

Maybe I’m not a failure after all. Maybe he didn’t have enough cord to come out. I think I can better accept that than my body not letting my baby engage. Maybe it was a good thing I didn’t fight the doctor on his medical decision. Oh my god, did I almost put my boy’s life in danger? Let’s say I did convince the doctor to let me keep labouring, and my boy didn’t make it, I would have been responsible for not being able to bring him home. I don’t think I’m cut out to be a mother anymore.

I suddenly feel so exposed on this table, why must I be naked it’s making things so much worse? I hate feeling the cold on my skin. It’s only on the surface, and it’s sinking into my bones. How much longer is this going to take? I don’t like being cold.

“How are you doing?” The anesthesiologist is still right beside me.

“I’m cold. I’m so cold.”

I am. I can’t stop shivering now. What if they can’t pull him out because I’m shaking so much? What if I’m interfering with their work? Oh my god I can not stop shaking, almost violently. The tears start trickling out of my eyes, this must be it for me.

“I’m so cold.”

I can hear footsteps behind me walking away, leaving the OR. Maybe they are leaving to grab the crash cart. I don’t know what my vitals are. I need to focus on breathing calmly. I’m ready for a nap though, I’ve been up for too long. Maybe if I close my eyes for just a second and imagine a warm blanket smothered over me, I’ll wake up when all of this is over.

And just as that thought entered my mind, a warmth did wrap itself around my body. It’s the nurses, piling hot blankets on top of my bare arms and shoulders. I can feel the warmth but it’s not working. Almost as if I’m sitting in an ice bath with a roof of hot towels overhead. The heat is there, it’s just not reaching me. I don’t know how long it’s been. I know that I’m growing colder, and there are more blankets being thrown on top of me. I’m tired and I can’t do this anymore, I can’t go any longer, help —

Whaa Whaa Whaa.

There he is. He’s here. It’s over.



BIO

Rosie Hart has been writing short stories and poetry since she was 8 years old. She studied psychology and biology in university but her love for writing has never dwindled. This is Rosie’s first publication, and she is excited to see where her writing journey takes her. Today she enjoys spending time with her spouse, son, and pug Miss Moo in the great outdoors.  







A Single Blossom

by Laura Lambie



            Doctor Emerson had said it would be her final trip. He reached across his desk and grasped her alien hand (when she looked at it now she saw knobby knuckles and thin translucent skin covered in liver spots), and said, “Kay, it doesn’t look like it will be too much longer now. I’m sorry.”

            She had packed filled with somber melancholy, knowing it was the last time she would see the turquoise water lit up by the sun, and the charming cobblestone streets she had first seen when her husband Harry had taken her to Lake Como as a young woman. Her older, mature husband who was also a mentor. He had held her hand and led her to the shore; after her eyes traveled over the glowing blue she turned to him. Sunlight touched his hair, and the illuminated strands were tousled by the breeze coming up from the water; he smiled and his eyes radiated his happiness at being the one to show it to her.

            Their last trip had been wonderful. Harry had seemed full of new vigor; Kay had seen a glimpse of his old, energetic self. But it had been short lived. They arrived home and two months later she was dressed in black, standing in front of his rain-streaked coffin, listening to the pastor talk about the inscrutable ways of God.

            And now, all these years later, she was going to see it for the last time. Before she left for the airport she spoke to her son. In his usual perfunctory manner he said, “have a good trip mom. Let us know when you get back and we’ll have you over for dinner.” He had said that about dinner many times, but she had only been there twice since Christmas. As she looked out the window at the men loading the luggage onto the plane, she tried to remember when relations with Tim had settled into glacial distance.

            When Tim and Joan had been newlyweds, all had been warmth and love. Joan, so solicitous of her widowed mother-in-law, would call her every night. Then the first grandchild came, and the second, and the calls spread farther and farther apart until they stopped altogether. A couple of months before Kay had run into Joan at the supermarket. The warmth that had been in her eyes was replaced by a distant, sad expression, and when Kay asked her about it, all Joan did was look away.

            Kay pulled on her seatbelt as the plane readied for takeoff. She was looking forward to a change of scene. Morning after morning, as she would awaken from a fitful sleep, her eyes would open and rest on Harry’s cedar chest at the foot of the bed, where he used to keep his sweaters. She would lay there, feeling the ache of arthritis in her legs, and the full emptiness would descend on her. No busyness, no calls from her friend Maureen down the street complaining about her daughter, no endless loop of Wheel of Fortune to distract her, no bridge games at the country club. Just herself, and the emptiness that had crept in over the years since her husband had died.

            She thought of those mornings at the lake, when she would wake up early and go to the window to watch the water change from pink-streaked to bright blue as the sun rose higher in the sky, until Harry came up behind her and put his arms around her. She was hoping that seeing it one last time would revive her memories of him, bring them closer to her after all these years. It was all that mattered to her now that everything was coming to a close, and she realized that there was nothing, nothing but this.

            For a long time now, she had felt numb as she sat staring at the scratched wood of the pew in front of her on Sunday mornings. The service, the words, meant nothing to her. None of it mattered. The world was the world, life was life, death was death, and that was all there was.

            But she went every week and sat with Jemma, the nice young mother who picked her up and took her home, who invited her to dinner once a month. After service she had coffee and donuts, and laughed and smiled, and nodded when people said God is good.

            Kay gripped the armrests as the plane picked up speed and took off. She swallowed one of the sleeping pills Doctor Emerson had given her, and she slipped into a peaceful rest for the remainder of the ride. When she arrived in Como, and the car went around a bend and the lake came into view—an immense monolith of cobalt blue sparkling in the mid-day sun—for a moment her spirits lifted and she saw Harry again, his kind eyes beaming into hers as he held her hand. But then she got into the room, and saw the same old pink walls, and the one wall that had a mural of grape leaves hanging from a garden trellis, and the drab grey descended over her again. She sat down near the window and looked out at the water until the sun set, then she put on her pajamas, turned out the light and went to sleep.

            Kay heard a faint, far away knock. It became louder and louder until she jolted awake. Sunlight fell across the pink floral bedspread as two bright shafts. She sighed and pushed herself up against the pillows.

            “Come in.”

             “Buongiorno,” said the young woman in a black maid’s uniform, as she pushed the tray into the room and set it next to the bed.

            “Buongiorno. Grazie.”

            “Prego.” She smiled, turned around and closed the door behind her. Kay pulled the tray over the bed, poured cream into the coffee and stirred until it turned a light brown color. She was about to sip, but then she realized, why not add sugar? Why try to be healthy now? It would all end soon, she might as well do what she wanted. She put two heaping teaspoons of sugar into her mug, stirred, then sipped the warm, sweet liquid. Now that was what coffee should taste like.

            She took a small bite of toast. It was hard to get breakfast down these days; she tried one more bite then laid it aside. Lingering over her coffee, she put off the moment when she had to get out of bed. After her second cup she pushed the tray away and slowly moved her legs to the floor. Pain shot up; she realized she had forgotten to take her aspirin first thing. She picked up the pills on the nightstand and swallowed them down with the last remnants of cold coffee.

            A half hour later she tried again. This time, the pain was muted, and she was able to get into her swimsuit and cover-up. She ran a comb through her thin, brittle hair, and remembered when she was first married, and Harry would run his fingers through her thick brown hair, when she was his girl bride, only nineteen to his thirty-five. Her mother had said a May-December romance would never work out. But they had been happy, except for the times when one of Harry’s black moods descended on him, but that hadn’t been often enough to mar the joy their love had brought them.

            Kay laid the comb down and put on her sun hat. She had put on some make-up out of habit, but these days nothing could be done for her looks. The sagging, the blotching, the intricate web of wrinkles: it was all inevitable and a dash of color here and there wasn’t going to solve anything.

            With a sigh she picked up her straw bag in one hand, and taking her cane in the other, made her way to the beach. Halfway down the trail a man asked her if she needed help. She said no thank you, and continued on at her slow pace. She reached the sand, and with each step pushed the cane firmly to steady herself. She arrived at one of the beach chairs, carefully set herself down and looked out at the water. It was as beautiful as she remembered. She stared at it, watching it undulate under the bright sunshine. She meant to take out her book, but before she knew it her eyes opened onto orange and pink streaked water, and a beach covered in lengthening shadows. She felt a pressure on her arm.

            “Signora, posso aiutarla?”

            Kay struggled to focus on two quivering pinpoints of blue that became wide-set eyes beneath a strong ridge of brow bone; an aquiline nose descended from between the eyes and led down to lips that were made of harmonious curves. Suddenly there, in her line of sight, beauty had sprung up. With a tinge Kay realized that the young man’s beauty was fleeting. It would fade. But there it was before her, and behind the manifestation of it that would fade, it felt as though there were something that would go on.

            “Posso aiutarla?”

            “Uh, si, per favore.”

            He helped her up and they began heading back to the hotel. She didn’t look at him, but his face was stamped in her mind. It seemed to flow over her thoughts, softening their edges.

            They reached the trail. “Thank you I can make it from here.” She looked at him in the dim light, and saw that he was very young. Probably no more than twenty-five.

            “No, I go with you,” he said, and he smiled. She was reminded of a piece of music she had heard with Harry years ago, when he had taken her to a concert. There had been that moment, when the orchestra had swelled, and she had felt it was beautiful. He smiled again, and there it was again, the same feeling. She smiled back but then immediately regretted it, thinking of the wrinkles and sagging and that new liver spot she found under her eye the other morning. But she was being an old fool. What did it matter what she looked like? There was nothing to be done, nothing to be gotten. It was like when she sat in her garden at home, surrounded by her roses. They were beautiful and that was all.

            When they reached the entrance of the hotel long shadows descended over the cobblestones, and the sky had dimmed considerably. Kay looked up at the young man. “Thank you.” She was embarrassed to find tears welling up in her eyes.

            “You’re welcome.” He smiled then disappeared into the shadows. As Kay made her way up the stairs into the hotel, somehow her arthritis felt more bearable. When she got to her room she set her bag down and sank into the armchair next to the window. Stars were beginning to etch into the night sky, filling it with pinpoints of light. She thought about the vastness of the space in which the stars hung, and wondered how it had all come into being. Opening the window she heard the sound of the breeze passing over the water. She closed her eyes and let the simple sound wash over her. Once again she saw the young man’s face, set against the pink and orange sky. Its beauty seemed eternal but it was fleeting; in a few short years it would be marred by the marks of time.

            She opened her eyes to a sky full of pale pink light that sent its tendrils out over the lake. What a mistake to fall asleep in the chair. Her legs were stiff and painful, and she would need to get across the room to take the aspirin. Holding onto the arm of the chair she pushed herself up. The pain and stiffness intensified. She inhaled a long deep breath, took a few steps, leaned against the bed and made her way around it. She sat down, picked up the aspirins and swallowed them.   

            Another day. She had another whole day to live, and somehow it seemed full of promise. She picked up the phone and cancelled breakfast in bed. She would eat at the hotel restaurant.

            An hour later she stood in front of the bathroom mirror. Why not put on a little eye shadow? Yes her eyelids were crepey, and had lost their firmness, but some color could only improve things, it certainly couldn’t hurt. She dabbed her lids with light brown.

            There were quite a few people in the dining room by the time Kay made her way there.  She sat near a window. The sky had become cloudy, the water was choppy gray waves, and dark clouds loomed on the horizon. But still, Kay knew the sun was above it all, radiating light and warmth. She heard a familiar voice rise up. Sitting across the room at the table near the stairway was the young man. He smiled at the young woman sitting across from him, and he laughed—a full, sonorous sound—that spread throughout the room and brightened it. The young man smiled and waved at her. With a start Kay realized she had been staring.

            She waved back as the young woman turned. Kay saw long, shiny blonde hair and large eyes. Young, as Kay had been so many years ago. The young woman’s face melted into a smile. Kay smiled back, feeling for a moment like she was a part of her own youth again. The couple exchanged a few words, then the young man got up and approached Kay’s table.  

            “Good morning. You join us?”

            “Good morning. That would be lovely, thank you.”

            He picked up her coffee cup and purse and offered his arm to her. When she sat down the young woman smiled and said, “I’m Clara. This is Franco.”

            “Nice to meet you. I’m Kay.”

            “Franco saw you sleeping in the chair, and it gets so dark at the lake at night.”

            “It was so kind of him to help me.”

            “His grandmother passed away this year. It was very hard on him. He said you remind him of her.”

            Kay thought of the sporadic, cold, phone calls of her son. She looked into Franco’s eyes; the warmth she saw in them kindled something within her, something she hadn’t felt for many years.

            “Sorry for your loss,” said Kay.

            “Thank you.” Franco turned his gaze to Clara. “We’re here on our honeymoon.”

            “Congratulations,” said Kay. “I used to come here with my husband. He passed away years ago.”

            “I’m sorry,” said Franco. “Do you have any children?”

            “I have a son and two grandchildren, but. . . but I don’t see them too often.”

            “Both of us had our grandmothers living with us,” said Clara. “But in the United States, things are different.”

            Kay nodded her head. “Yes, very different.”

            “We’re going for a bike ride today,” said Franco.

            “I used to do that with my husband.” Kay remembered the warm breeze flowing over her as she turned a corner and saw the glowing water of the lake. “You’ll enjoy it.”

            “Yes we’re looking forward to it. Tonight we’re going to eat at the Trattoria Bel Canto. Do you know it? You can sit on the balcony and watch the sunset as you eat. Would you like to join us?”

             “Oh no, I couldn’t interfere with a couple on their honeymoon.”

            “To tell you the truth, you have the same smile as my grandmother.” Something passed between Franco’s being and her own, and she felt she had to accept the invitation.

            “Of course, that would be wonderful. Thank you.”

            Kay spent the afternoon at a café, next to a large stone flowerpot overflowing with white jasmine flowers, looking out at the water, drinking coffee and remembering when she had met Harry. Harry and her father had been working on an important case together, and one Friday night he came over for dinner.  Kay had sat through many such dinners with her father’s colleagues; she had expected another boring evening as usual as she made her way down the stairs and turned the corner into the dining room, and saw Harry sitting next to her mother.  But this time, something happened. She stopped at the threshold and wondered why she had chosen to wear her old grey dress that was a little too big and hung at the shoulders in an odd way, rather than that new pink dress that had a belt and swirled out on the bottom. Too late now. She smoothed her hair and entered the room. Harry looked at her, and when her mother introduced her, a moment went by where he didn’t say anything, then he blushed and said, “it’s a pleasure to meet you.”

            She smiled. “Thank you. You too.” She sat down opposite her mother, next to her father who was at the head of the table.

            Her father cleared his throat. “Now then, let’s eat.” He began carving the meat. His face, as he carved, was impassive as always. Kay could barely remember it showing any other expression. Every day he would come home, eat dinner and go into his study. If she ever knocked on the door their conversation was short, and always ended with him saying, “are you keeping up with your schoolwork?”

            As she ate she felt Harry looking at her. Once she dropped her fork and it clattered onto her plate. Heat rose to her cheeks. She glanced up at Harry. He smiled at her, with a smile that helped her to feel calm. When the dinner was over he stood in the foyer getting his coat on. He shook her father’s hand, then her mother’s, and when he shook Kay’s she felt a firm pressure, and his hand lingered a little longer than it should and he looked into her eyes.

            She went to bed thinking about the handshake. The pressure of his hand on hers had ignited something in her; she longed to see him again. Harry came for dinner every Friday night while the case was going on. They would eat, then Harry and her father would disappear into the study until the early hours of the morning. While Kay fell asleep she knew Harry was still in the house, and she wondered exactly what he was doing at that moment and if he was thinking of her.

            When the case was over, and it was his last dinner there, Harry had looked across the table at Kay with a wistful expression.  As he stood in the entryway pulling on his gloves, for a moment it looked like he might say something to her, but then he only lowered his eyes, looked up at her one last time, put on his hat and went away.

            Kay had felt a hole in her heart. All night she couldn’t sleep, thinking of what it meant never to see Harry again. Why hadn’t he said anything to her? Why slink off into the night like that?

            She had lost hope by the time the annual firm Christmas party rolled around. She hadn’t wanted to go, but her mother had said, with a stern look on her face, “the family goes every year to support your father. Now go get ready.”

            With a heavy heart she pulled on her red velvet dress. As she sat in front of the mirror sweeping her hair up into a French twist, she paused to examine her features. What was it about her that had caused Harry to leave? All she saw were her familiar brown eyes, her upturned nose, and her thinnish lips. Maybe that was it. She looked like every other girl at her parent’s country club. What was there that could set her apart in Harry’s eyes?

            Sitting in the back seat of the car, driving through the town looking at the Christmas wreaths dotting Main Street, she wondered why she couldn’t forget him. Even when that handsome young man from her father’s office had asked her out, who everyone said looked like Montgomery Clift, she had felt nothing. She had only said yes to please her mother.

            She entered the country club between her parents, past a glittering display of white Christmas lights. Kay scanned the room full of people. Her heart sank when she realized Harry wasn’t there. Halfway through the party, when her mother started her annual Christmas conversation with her father’s secretary, she decided to go out onto the balcony that overlooked the lawn. She leaned against the railing and breathed in the cool night air.

            “Kay.”

            She turned around and felt a stab in her gut when she saw Harry. It took a moment for her to respond. “Harry, hi.”

            “How are you?”

            What should she say? She was miserable. But she couldn’t let him know that. “Fine thank you. How are you?”

            He ran his hand over his forehead. “I’ve been OK I suppose. What have you been up to?”

            “School and applying to college. I had my nineteenth birthday.”

            “Right, of course, your senior year. Happy birthday Kay.”

            “Thank you.”

            Silence descended. Harry moved closer. “Kay.” He took her hand. “I’ve missed you. I know I’m ridiculous, a thirty-five-year-old man telling that to a nineteen-year-old girl. But there it is. I’ve missed you terribly. I don’t know what to do.”

            Tears sprung to her eyes. “Harry, I missed you too. I couldn’t understand why you left like that and never came back.”

            “Kay.” He pulled her close into a hug. Before she knew what was happening he leaned down and kissed her. “I know I’m so much older. And I tried to forget you. But I just couldn’t. I know it’s foolish. You’re only nineteen and you were eighteen when I met you. But I can’t help it Kay.”

            Six months later they were married. And now here she was alone, all these years later, seeing the lake for the last time. She thought of Harry at the end, in his hospital bed, his bone thin hand reaching out to hers as he wheezed and gasped for air, then everything stopped and she knew he was gone. And she’d had no idea how to live without him.

            She finished her coffee, and was grateful to see that the sunlight was beginning to slant and mellow out. She glanced at the dainty silver watch Harry had given her for her thirtieth birthday. She had to meet Franco and Clara in a half hour. She paid her bill and made her way back to her room. When she opened her suitcase and rifled through her clothes, she realized that she hadn’t packed anything nice enough for the restaurant they were going to. She settled on a plain pink blouse and her tan skirt. It was passable. She wondered if she could do anything with her hair. She stood in front of the mirror and pulled a comb through it. It looked dryer than usual. She put in some curl cream but it didn’t help. Then she had an idea. She opened the door of her room and went down the elevator. Outside the hotel were large flowerpots full of purple bougainvillea. She used her nail scissors to cut off one of the blossoms.

            Back in her room she attached it to her hair with a bobby pin. Why hadn’t she thought of that earlier? She had to admit it looked very nice, and took attention away from her hair, which had lost all its beauty over the years. She added a touch of pink lipstick. She felt ready.

            Kay entered the restaurant, lit by a large glittering chandelier, and scanned the room. Franco and Clara were at the bar. As Kay advanced she saw that Clara had put on black eyeliner, and it suited her very well. It brought out her large, expressive eyes.

            “Kay. Good evening,” said Franco. “How was your day?”

            “Lovely, thank you. How was the bike ride?”

            They exchanged a look. “It was wonderful.”

            The happiness of the couple made her think of her honeymoon with Harry. They had gone to Venice, spending their days wandering the ancient streets, lost in conversation. Over dinners in one charming restaurant or another, Harry had shared with her the history of the place. One evening, walking hand in hand, Harry stopped beneath a huge old tree rustling with the evening breeze, and pulled her close to him, and whispered in her neck that he loved her more than anything in the world, and he never knew that he could experience such happiness.

            “A honeymoon is such a special time,” said Kay.

            A waiter came up to them and led them out onto the balcony. The lights from the buildings on the opposite shore reflected in the water, and the sky glowed with the last vestiges of dusk. The mountains rose up from the lake, shadowy and mysterious.

            “I love your flower,” said Clara, “what a good idea.”

            “Thank you.”

            They ordered drinks and the waiter brought their menus. “The fish here is very good,” said Franco. “Clara and I came here on our first night.”

            After everyone ordered Kay said, “where are you two from?”

            “We’re from Bari,” said Franco. “It’s near the heel of the boot, on the Adriatic Sea.”

            “How did you meet?”

            “Clara’s grandmother lived down the street from us. Every week Clara and her parents would go there for Sunday dinner. We used to play together. Time went on, Clara went off to college, and I went to work in the family business, and I didn’t see her for a few years. One day, after work, I went to the store a few streets away, and on the way back, when I turned onto our street, I saw this woman, dressed in black, and when she turned around I saw those eyes. And that was it for me.”

            He reached across the table and covered Clara’s hand with his own.

            “How lucky you two are to find love,” said Kay. “My husband and I were very happy too. We used to come here every year. I wanted to see it one last . . .  that is, I wanted to see it again.”

            The waiter brought their food. As they ate, Franco and Clara shared stories about their wedding, and Kay shared some memories of Harry. The dinner ended before Kay knew it. When the bill came she took it. “I insist,” she said.

            “Kay we can’t.” Franco shook his head and gently pulled the bill from under Kay’s hand. “It’s our pleasure.” He smiled at her and she knew he was thinking of his grandmother. She felt overcome. She looked down into her drink. “Thank you for this lovely evening,” she said, “you don’t know how much it’s meant to me.”

            “Thank you,” said Franco.

            “Yes,” said Clara, “we had a wonderful time. Franco, why don’t you walk Kay back to her hotel?”

            The prospect of a walk with Franco, in the cool darkness of the evening, was very welcome to Kay.

            “Yes, of course.”

            Outside the restaurant, Clara gave Kay a hug. “Goodnight.”

            “Goodnight dear.” Before letting go of Clara’s shoulders, Kay looked into her eyes. In their gentle glow was the future; Clara had a whole future ahead of her, and the thought comforted Kay. Something would go on. 

            Clara touched Franco’s shoulder. “I’ll see you back at the room.”

            “Yes, see you there.” He turned to Kay. “Shall we?” He held out his arm. Kay placed her hand through it and they began walking.

            “How much of your trip do you and Clara have left?”

            “We’re leaving for Tuscany tomorrow. We have a week there. Then we head back home.”

            “What a lovely honeymoon.”

            “Yes. I saved for a year to have this time with Clara.”

            They walked on in silence. It was a clear night, and every now and again a gentle breeze came up. As Kay walked along next to Franco, her hand on his arm, she found herself thinking about the vaulted gold ceiling of the Como Cathedral. Funny, she hadn’t thought about that place in years. She and Harry had gone in that one time. It had been very beautiful, but so was the lake.

            They turned a corner and the hotel came into view, and Kay realized that these were her last few moments with Franco. It was so hard to let him go. “Franco, there’s something I want to give you. Please, come up for a minute.”

            “You don’t have to give me anything.”

            “No please. I need to.” Her eyes filled with tears. She took a deep breath. “I need to do this.”

            “Yes, of course. I’ll come up, don’t worry.”

            “Thank you.”

            They made their way up the stairs and into the hotel. They entered the elevator; it whirred and began ascending. They reached Kay’s floor and entered her room. It was dark, and she turned on a floor lamp near the door.

            “Please sit. I’ll be right back.”

            Franco sunk into the armchair as she went into the bathroom and closed the door. She unzipped her toiletry case, opened the small side pocket, and took out a gold watch. She had given it to Harry on their twenty-fifth anniversary. On it she had inscribed: All my love always, love Kay. She had kept it with her ever since Harry had died. But now she wanted Franco to have it. But why? She closed her eyes. It was one of the last things she had of Harry. Why give it to a young man she didn’t know? She saw again the first moment she had glimpsed Franco’s face, with the fading light behind him. She wanted to give it to him because she wanted to be a part of what she saw there, in his face, a part of the beauty she had seen. Somehow that would comfort her. She took the watch and opened the bathroom door.

            She felt a jolt of shock and fear when she saw that the man sitting there wasn’t Harry. Her mind reeled and it snapped back into her head that Franco was there. She took a deep breath. It was beginning its inevitable spread to her brain, much sooner than Doctor Emerson had predicted. Taking another deep breath, she made her way to Franco. He stood up.

            “I want you to have this. Please.” She held out the watch. Franco took it and examined it.

            “You gave this to your husband didn’t you?”

            “Yes I did.”

            He shook his head. “I can’t take this from you. You’re making a mistake. I don’t think you’re thinking clearly.”

            “Please. I need you to have it.”

            “But why?”

            Her eyes welled up and she felt a catch in her throat. “Because I’m dying, and I saw you on the beach and I need you to have it.”

            “Kay please don’t cry. You’ll make yourself sick. Come here.” He led her to the bed and sat down next to her. He put his arm around her. “It’s OK.”

            She held onto his collar and cried into his shirt. After a few minutes she calmed down, and she laid her head on his shoulder. The sparkling blue of the lake seemed to enter their room, and for that brief moment, her head resting on his shoulder, she felt like she was a part of him. Outside, the lake was being ruffled by the light wind, the waves were rippling, and there was something there: something in the lake, something in Franco, something she had forgotten about for years, as she had sunk down into her pain after Harry had died.

            Kay lifted her head and held the watch out to him. He closed her hand over it and pushed it back towards her. “Kay I know something I’d like to have.”

            “What is it?”

            He pointed to her flower. “May I?”

            “Yes of course.”

            He gently pulled out the bobby pin and took the blossom. “I will always keep this to remember you by. I will cherish it.”

            Kay’s eyes welled up. “Thank you Franco. Thank you so much.”

            “Knowing you has made my trip even more special. Thank you for that. You’re a lovely woman.” He squeezed her hand. “Are you going to be OK?”

            “Yes, I think I will.”

            “Good. I’m glad to hear that.” He stood up. “I have to get back now.”

            “I know.”

            Franco helped her up from the bed and they walked to the door. He kissed both of her cheeks. “Goodbye Kay.”

            “Goodbye Franco.”

            Kay looked into his eyes one last time. He gave her a sad smile, and then he was gone. 

            Kay woke up late the next morning. She thought she would feel wretched, but instead, she felt a ray of hope. Bright sunlight filled the room, and she felt that somehow, there was something good for her that day. By that time Franco would be gone, somewhere among the olive trees of Tuscany. It made her happy to think of him, walking arm in arm with Clara, looking at some beautiful landscape, the sunshine touching his features, illuminating them with its glow.

            She took her aspirin and waited a half hour. As she got dressed she decided she wanted to see the cathedral one more time. She would eat lunch then spend the afternoon there.

            The sky was a bright, cloudless blue as she made her way across the square, and in spite of the arthritis and the aches and pains, she felt somehow young again. As though there was something more, something waiting beyond the shadows of her life.

            She stepped into the cool dimness of the cathedral. It lay before her, vast and intricate. Incense hung heavy in the air; she took in a long, deep breath. As she walked in she was conscious of an expansive feeling, a feeling that she was being enveloped within the immensity of what surrounded her. She sat down and looked up at the enormous vaulted ceiling. Her eyes were drawn to a stained-glass window; sunlight streamed through the deep purple, pink and blue panes, and splashed color onto the wall. Kay’s eyes fixated on the colored sunshine. She watched it quivering on the wall, and she began to cry. The crying turned into sobs that she couldn’t control, that made her shoulders heave.

            Someone touched her arm. “Signora, stai bene?”

            But all Kay could do was look away and continue to sob. The man stood there for a few moments more then shuffled away.

            When she woke up the light had become dim.  She looked around for Harry. Where was he? He was always right next to her. She stood up and felt pain in her legs. What had happened? Then the arthritis, the disease, Harry’s death all hit her again as if she had never felt them before. She was old now. She was dying. She was alone.  

            But what about the colored light from the stained-glass window, what about the lake sparkling in the sunshine, what about Franco’s face, the waning sunlight surrounding it like a halo—there had to be something behind all that. She sat down and looked up at a vaulted dome, etched with symmetrical gold inlays swirling up to the apex. They had built the cathedral to be so intricate, so grand, so beautiful. As she looked up at the dome, a peaceful feeling, like the faint echo of a sweet sound barely heard from far away, made gentle waves into her being. When Harry had died, she had thought that all of him, even his essence that in their most intimate moments she felt she had seen, had ceased to exist. No hope. Her Harry, who she had loved more than anyone, destroyed by death. She looked towards the altar; the face of Christ twisted in pain no longer brought her that uncomfortable, lost feeling. The pain was a part of life, but it wasn’t everything. Somehow she had lost sight of that. She sat there for a long time, until she knew night had fallen.

            Then she started back to the hotel, the peaceful feeling her companion as she walked, feeling the evening breeze caressing her skin. She passed a small restaurant that had a flowerpot filled with pink Wisterias in front of it. She remembered her rose garden at home. How many days had gone by in the last few years, when the flowers had been in glorious bloom, and she had stayed inside, always having an excuse as to why she didn’t go out and enjoy them? She had turned her back on them so many times. She had turned her back on so many things.

            She turned the corner and saw the hotel. It was such a beautiful night. She would go up, get her sweater then eat dinner at a place where she could sit outside. But as she rode up in the elevator, she felt a sudden burst of indigestion. She shouldn’t have drunk that extra cup of coffee after lunch. Back in her room she took some antacid but the pain only seemed to get worse. She laid down on the bed and looked out the window at the darkness of the night. Somehow, the darkness seemed to be overlayed with a sort of peaceful harmony, something beyond anything that could come and go, come into being and then decay. She felt it within herself, linking the old, arthritis-ridden Kay with the young girl, standing on the balcony, looking into Harry’s eyes as he told her he loved her. She felt it beckoning to her, coming off the lake, coming from everywhere; she let go and let herself merge into it, the eternal beauty.    

            The young woman in the black maid’s uniform pushing the breakfast tray found her the next morning, eyes open, face peaceful and serene. She reached over and closed Kay’s eyes.



BIO

Laura Lambie is a native New Yorker who now resides in Texas. She loves the written word more than any other art form. Her short stories can be found in The New English Review, and in issue 32 of the Ginosko Literary Journal. Her work was shortlisted in the 2023 J.F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction. She is currently working on a novel. 








Homeomorphism

by Erik Harper Klass


1

A cold wind. Rain threatening (distant fallstreaks). A two-story building of weathered bricks and arched windows. A little door on the left under a blue awning. On the awning’s scalloped valance, a single word in faint, faded, white majuscular letters: fortune.

A man, a soldier, back from a war. Walking and then stopping and then, on this day, feeling he had nothing much to lose, entering.

The room: windowless, dark, tapestries on walls. In the room’s center, a round table draped with a cloth of no apparent color. A single candle in a candleholder with a green frustum-shaped shade. Two old chairs with turnings placed on opposite sides of the table, as if set for a game of chess. And sitting on one of the chairs, facing the man, who stood motionless at the room’s threshold: a woman.

The woman: Not old, not young. Hair pulled back like (he thought, in an instant) de La Tour’s Magdalene. Bracelets on both wrists that glimmered and sounded like tiny bells. Eyes that, at a glance, seemed both everchanging and constant, like (he thought (he had a literary mind)) forge fires. And then, as if in response to his gaze (for he stood there looking), she leaned back into the darkness and he could no longer see her eyes. She spread her hands out, as if to show she were unarmed, and then her hands disappeared beneath the table. He imagined them resting in her lap, like nesting, nestling birds. She gestured with her head for him to sit. The door closed behind him. She may have been beautiful.

“You are sad,” she said.

His answer: nothing at all. There was no question. He was sitting now.

Behind the woman, and a bit to her left (his right): a tall cabinet vitrine, with two glass doors, in which the man could see the following: the back of the woman’s left shoulder, a candle flickering beneath a green frustum-shaped shade, a man staring into the two glass doors of a tall cabinet vitrine. She asked him to close his eyes and put out his hands. He heard the vitrine open, the sound of movement, the rustling of silk. And then he felt the weight of, and curled his fingers around, an object.

“An hourglass,” he said right away, as if this were a game of speed.

“Not what it is,” she replied. “What it represents. What it means.”

The man began to open his eyes but she asked him to keep them closed (it is not clear how she knew his eyes were opening). He ran his fingers over the object. Glass. Wood. Three metallic posts—spindles they are called—equally spaced circumferentially.

“An hourglass could mean time passing,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, probably nodding.

“Or time past, or sand, or a place where hourglasses are made.”

“Yes,” she said. He could hear a smile in her reply.

Filling the room: a silence. He turned the object in his hands.

“Perhaps I am out of time,” he said. “Or time is nothing at all, an illusion, merely the consequence of the chronological accretion of my memories. Or perhaps I am in prison, as is the sand within the object (I assume the object is filled with sand),” he said, shaking the hourglass and holding it up to his right ear, as one might shake a gift before opening it.

“Good,” she said.

He kept his eyes closed, again turned the object, ran his hands along its topography, its declivities and protrusions.

“Perhaps it is her,” he said, “perhaps her body.”

She did not reply.

“Perhaps the hourglass is loss.”

“You have lost her?”

“I have lost her, yes,” he said. “She has left. I don’t blame her for leaving.”

She waited. The clockwork of the universe advanced inexorably, while inexorably the clockwork of the hourglass did not. And then she invited him to open his eyes. She reached out with extremely long arms and reclaimed the object. Yes it was an hourglass: glass and wood, three vertical spindles constructed of brass. He felt strangely guilty looking at it, found himself looking away. The woman returned it to the darkness of the vitrine.

“That is all for today,” she said.

The man rose and said goodbye and, without paying, without another word, left the room and entered the wind and rain (it had indeed begun to rain). There was, it seems, an unspoken understanding that he would return.

2

She said to him on his second visit: “There is a field of mathematics called topology, which involves the exploration of the properties of objects that in fundamental ways do not change when these objects are twisted or deformed, a transformation we call homeomorphism. The most common object used to illustrate this transformation is a doughnut (a torus shape)—for convenience, please imagine an uncooked doughnut. (There is nothing new about any of this,” she said. “You have likely heard all of this before. I am not trying to impress you.) We might take this doughnut and, in the words of the mathematicians, ‘continuously deform’ the object into the shape of a coffee mug. Try to imagine this. The space within the mug’s handle was once the doughnut’s hole, and the cup itself was once the doughnut’s body (imagine forming the cup by depressing the doughnut’s dough with your thumbs—carefully, carefully). The doughnut and the coffee mug are, mathematically speaking, indistinguishable. As abstract spaces, they are topologically identical. This is sometimes called the torus and mug morphology,” she said.

3

“Freud,” she said, “described a time when an infant experiences what he called an ‘oceanic feeling,’ in which the infant has not yet developed an awareness of the shape and limits of its body, and is thus completely at one with the universe.”

She said this, among other things, on his third visit. This, this oceanic feeling, was not one the man could remember or hope for or even begin to imagine.

4

On the forth visit she once again asked the man to close his eyes, and she reached into the vitrine and pulled forth an object, set it in his hands. This was by now already a ritual of theirs. He accepted the object as the poor accept their alms.

“Can one without sight recreate an object, discovered only by touch, graphically on a white page?” she asked.

He turned the object over in his hands. A key, definitely a key, a giant key, brass perhaps, attached to . . . attached to a wooden fruit . . . a pear, yes a pear.

“Before you on the table,” she said,” is a malleable plastic surface which will be our proverbial white page.”

He nodded, he had seen this when he arrived, a flat white rectangle, his eyes remained closed. He patted the table to his right and found a kind of stylus in the exact place where he remembered seeing a kind of stylus. She did not speak. He drew. His right hand (the hand holding the stylus) moved. His left hand (the hand holding the giant key attached to a pear) moved. And while he drew, he thought of this woman before him in the darkness. He thought of her face. He thought of her eyes, which he felt in some strange way he had not yet really seen. They, these features of the woman, were but ideas of sensations, atmospheres, air. And then, as he drew this giant key attached to a wooden pear, he thought without meaning to (as was always the case) of a long straight road running unsheltered through a desert without shadows. He thought of a flash of light and sound. And then, silence. He thought of a helicopter and a bright white room and then another room and then a third room—only three rooms, but he could barely keep track—a room of incongruous congruent mirrors. When he was done drawing he put down the stylus with a hand that trembled.

She spoke: “So how do shapes and their surfaces speak to the mind? We know from past experiments that both the sighted and the blind represent the edges of surfaces—places where objects overlap, or places of meeting, of rupture, of collision—with lines, and, furthermore, we know that both the sighted and the blind take a specific vantage point to portray the objects of inquiry. Note that neither the overlap of these objects, nor these places of meeting or rupture, must be perceived with vision. Both can be experienced with the hands, by touch.”

He opened his eyes. He looked at the giant key attached to a wooden pear. Turned his head. Looked at the giant key attached to a wooden pear. His drawing was excellent.

5

Each time he came he worried that she would not be there, that she had never been there, that none of this was real, and somehow the accumulation of their meetings—they had somehow settled on weekly meetings, Fridays, just as the sun set at the very end of the street in bursts of red and orange between the silhouetted, linear array of equidistant plane trees—did nothing to dispel the uncertain nature of it all.

6

“I read somewhere,” he said to her on his sixth visit, “in an old book, when I was healing, in that room of mirrors, once I had regained the capacity for thinking, that some people, ‘whose minds are prone to mystery,’ believe that the objects of our contemplation, the objects themselves, are changed somehow when they are perceived. So when we see a painting, a monument, a tree, a lover’s face, we see not the object at all but rather a veil or membrane of forces and impressions—I believe this is how it was written—distorting the object, coloring it in some way. The pale-blue domes of a mosque encircled by white doves, the curving trace of a purple canyon, the sunlit, jagged architecture of a conquered city—all of these things are changed slightly, imperceptibly perhaps, by all the thousands and millions of people who have already seen them.” He stopped and reached for a glass of water that in fact was not there. “I suppose,” he continued, “if we consider this theory carefully, we discover that every time we see an object, we are met not with the object itself, but rather with the residue of all the eyes that have come before us.”

He played his hand over his cheeks, as if he were smoothing down a beard. She did not speak.

“Have you ever wished you did not have eyes?” he asked, apropos of everything.

Her reply: “There is a school of Ancient Greek philosophy called Eleaticism, which teaches, among other things, that the only certain science is that which places no dependence or importance whatsoever on the senses, and all to reason.”

And then she drifted back into the darkness.

7

On his seventh meeting with the woman, the man was presented with the challenge—the possibly impossible challenge—of arranging a collection of heterogeneous objects into some coherent pattern. From the vitrine, she, like a child showing off her toys, pulled out and presented to the man, his eyes closed as usual, many objects:

  1. a matryoshka doll: collapsed, smooth, rattling;
  2. a stone of course grain;
  3. an ashtray shaped like a heart;
  4. a nautilus;
  5. a bottle, globular;
  6. a huge china vase with some design—dragons? flowers?—in bas-relief (he reached his hand inside the object, a disturbingly rough surface, and felt the design approximated in reverse);
  7. a book with raised lettering on the cover (difficult to determine with fingers) marked by a heavy moiré silk ribbon (it would turn out to be an old volume of a book by Proust);
  8. after a moment: a spirit level;
  9. a mechanical lion that could walk several steps, and then, when a button was pressed, the lion’s breast would open and reveal a bouquet of flowers (lilies, for all he knew);
  10. a hobnail mustache cup (not to be confused with a shaving mug, which is a very different object);
  11. a shining metal cone, of the diameter of a die, that he found intolerably heavy;
  12. a sprig of straw or suchlike;
  13. a monocle (or a small magnifying glass with the handle broken off);
  14. an embarrassing toy coffin in which the corpse has a spring-loaded erect phallus that pops up when the lid is removed (did she smile as he touched this object, as he held, indeed even stroked, the phallus (for just a moment!) with the tips of his thumb and index finger?);
  15. a runcible spoon;
  16. a (the?) huge key attached to a wooden pear;
  17. a pop-up book created for blind children who cannot yet read braille. The book, as far as he could tell (he turned the pages with his eyes tightly closed), recounts the following story: The setting is a small village. A young man falls in love with a young woman—to be sure, an unrequited love. She is the most beautiful woman in this village: the way she laughs, the way she smiles, the way she moves her hair from her eyes when the wind blows. The young man does not imagine that the young woman could ever return his love. To put it ineloquently but succinctly: she is out of his league. The story continues. One spring day, walking forlornly down a floriferous path in the hills, the young man comes upon an old man attempting to pull a hand cart across a stream (the narrative does not explain the reasoning for the old man’s arduous path). The young man, as we can imagine (for he has been presented as a benevolent and kind young man), helps the old man pull the cart—the reader “sees” an image of the young man, up to his knees in the rushing stream, trousers rolled up, shoes tied and hanging from a shoulder, straining with the cart’s weight. After the crossing the old man reaches out with both bony hands and touches the young man’s face, running his hands down the young man’s cheeks, as if the old man were smoothing down the young man’s (nonexistent) beard. The young man is too startled to back away, to respond at all. And then the old man turns and ambles off with his cart into the shadows of trees. The young man is left bewildered by the old man’s touch. There is something extraordinary about it, something akin to the feeling of waking from a dream, or falling into one. He sits down on a rock at the edge of the stream. He picks up stones and tosses them absentmindedly. He observes the way the trees, mostly fir trees, take on the color of the sun as it sets (this is all done with textures, with differences in smoothness and roughness on the page). He listens to the songs of birds (various notes in high relief on a swirling staff), and he wonders, in a moment of digression, what aspect of these songs is most important for attracting mates: pitch or rhythm, or perhaps it is something else, some fine structure that goes beyond what human hearing can discern (and he is reminded, in this extended moment of digression, of the importance of the sound of prose; we should listen to the words, he thinks, as if we were birds (all of this—his thoughts, etc.—is made clear by the textural “images” on the page)). And then, for no apparent reason the young man can recall, he leans over and observes his reflection in the water. A miracle! A transformation! He is beautiful! Subsequent events are not hard for the well-read reader to anticipate. The young man returns to the village. One thing leads to another (one may turn the pages quickly now), and the young man and the young woman fall in love. They walk hand in hand through fields, they kiss in a floriferous park with wind-tossed trees, they hold each other’s bodies close and dance (more notes across the page), they lie together (probably naked, but concealed beneath blankets) in a room lit by candles, etc. They eventually marry. The story continues, and the reader is led to understand that time has passed. The reader (that is, the feeler) learns that the young man, over the course of events, has become rich. He is a writer, apparently a great writer, and the people of the village pay him for his craft (an outlandish thought!), and, additionally, he has received several lucrative grants from various foundations and fellowships. The reader (feeler) turns the page and now the young man is on his way to a reading of a recent short of his that had been published in a prestigious literary journal, the reading taking place at a university to which he is running late, and along the same floriferous path mentioned above he comes across the same old man with the same hand cart at the same stream (what are the odds?), the latter trying—and, once again, failing—to make a crossing. This time the young man walks quickly past. He has no time to help the old man. (By now the reader (that is, the feeler) knows where this is going. Everything is as clear as day, so to speak. These stories have been written since time immemorial. Every story tells a story already told. Even the young man on the page knows this well.) Time, once again, passes, and the young man returns from what was, in his estimation, an excellent, well-received reading, after which he had answered various questions related to the author’s “method” and “craft,” in an erudite and often agreeably enigmatic manner, much to the pleasure of all in attendance. He returns to his home and enters. He sets down his writer’s satchel. He goes to greet his wife with a kiss, as per usual. She turns to him. And as his face approaches hers, she recoils. She decides—in a flash, in a second, which is how it sometimes goes with these things—that she no longer loves him. Yes the decision is hasty, but it is as if she has felt this way for a long time, as if this seed of their dissolution had been planted long ago and only now has broken the soil and begun to blossom—rapidly, floriferously. The reader sees (feels) their hands separating. The reader sees (feels) her packing her things. The reader sees (feels) her drifting off into a rain-streaked distance. On the last page of the book the reader sees (feels) the young man—no longer, in truth, so young—standing alone, in an atmosphere of blue melancholy (the reader’s (feeler’s) fingertips seemingly convey to the reader’s (feeler’s) brain a tactile transcription of the prismatic specter). And then, as the reader closes the book, the disfigured young man folds up and collapses into the flat emptiness of his eternal imprisonment; 
  18. the carapace of a hawksbill turtle;
  19. and a dress; he imagines—he is not sure why—a floral print, with eight buttons down the front (or perhaps the back).

But how to arrange these object? Color is out of the question. Perhaps by size (small to large)? By weight (light to heavy)? By softness to hardness? By smoothness to roughness? By fragmentation to solidity? By shape (roundness to angularity)? By sound (those objects that rattle when shaken to those that do not)? The man finds that no sooner has he settled on one methodology than his criteria becomes unstable and his groupings become precarious, and he feels compelled to go back and try again, splitting up objects that are nearly the same, superimposing different criteria, frenziedly beginning all over again, becoming more and more disturbed, and teetering finally on the brink of anxiety.

If there is a lesson to the exercise, the woman has not made it clear, she will never make it clear. But there is a lesson. Of course there is a lesson.

8

And on their eighth meeting he sat before her at the table, and she explained to him about a special kind of line called a “long line” (or “Alexandroff line”), which she defined as “a topological space, something like a regular (or ‘real’) line, but much longer. (Furthermore,” she explained, parenthetically, “the long line is not a Lindelöf space, is not second countable, is not metrizable, is not paracompact, and is not normal.) We may think of a real line as having a countable number of line segments. The long line, however,” she continued, “has an uncountable number of such segments. When the distance between a man and the object of his desire is a real line, the man may traverse the line, he may—if he is diligent, if he is tireless, if he is lucky—find his prize (imagine a point on the line) waiting for him, in all her punctiform perfection. A long line, however,” she continued, “cannot be traversed. The desired object cannot be reached, cannot be touched. The man who is separated from his lover by a long line will suffer, yes, but he will eventually forget about her, for when any distance is discovered to be unbridgeable, this distance, over time—ironically perhaps—collapses and eventually disappears.”

“That all sounds very profound,” the man replied, rubbing his temples. Truth be told, his mind, around the word “metrizable,” had wandered and settled on more tangible considerations, such as the simple and strangely soothing sound of the woman’s voice (that is, form, sans content).

She leaned back, once again, as always, from darkness into deeper darkness, and, barely perceptibly, smiled. “All too often one judges something to be profound when in fact one has merely failed to grasp it. Perhaps the ‘long line’ is a figment of my imagination. Perhaps what I tell you is gibberish. Perhaps I know nothing at all.”

9

On his ninth visit she placed a Rubin’s vase, approximately the size of a human head, before him on the table and invited him to feel it with both hands, as if he were spinning pottery.

“Tell me,” she said, “do you feel the concavities and convexities of the contours of the vase, which is to say, do you feel the vase itself?”

He ran his hands over the vase’s surface.

“Or,” she continued, “do you feel the athwart faces of two lovers, peering at each other from across an empty chasm, always, forever, just a few inches apart?”

He moved his hands for a while longer, and then he placed them face down on the table, as if he were about to be interrogated, and he said, without the slightest doubt: “The latter.”

10

On his tenth visit the woman told the man the following story (this is what they would sometimes do: this, in truth, is what we all do: tell stories): “St. Brigid once, it has been said,” she said, “performed the miracle of giving a blind woman the gift of sight. But for an instant. Only an instant. The ‘blind’ woman, if I may embellish a bit, saw spreading fields of unimaginable colors—cinnabar, saffron, xanthic, celadon, cyan—upon which cattle grazed, each animal frozen in time. She saw scattered clouds in the sky, in the exact shape—she thought, in this instant—of cattle grazing upon fields. She saw the gentle outline of distant hills (puce, violescent). She saw a hawk disappearing into the sun, to become one with the sun, to never leave the sun. She saw orchards of apple and plum trees, and the long shadows of orchards of apple and plum trees. She saw St. Brigid’s face, beautiful, a framing white veil, one single unruly strand of auburn hair coming loose (could this be?), a cross hanging from a black cord below her chin. What I have described includes perhaps a millionth of a millionth of a percent of a percent of what the woman saw. The woman,” the woman continued, “found this scene so beautiful, so vivid, that this instant of sight was enough. The memory of her sensations (for memory is what, less than a second later, as she returned to blindness, these sensations had already become) lingered with the reverberations and recurrences of these colors and objects, would illuminate her mind and thoughts, for the remainder of her days.”

11

On his eleventh visit the woman said: “Some believe that we are able to remember everything that happens to us, everything, in fact, that is happening anywhere in the universe, down to the smallest detail. Each winding silver-gray arabesque of the candle smoke, each spinning fleck of dust, the sound of a mountain settling, every word spoken, even the echoes of another’s thoughts. We are that open, that permeable to sensations. So what our brains must do,” she continued, “according to this theory, is defend ourselves from the world around us. Our brains act merely as filters, keeping us from becoming entirely overwhelmed by what is essentially an endless and voluminous onslaught of mostly useless information. You are probably doing this now,” she said to the man. “Even these words will be lost to you, like yesterday’s clouds. Only that which is most important is taken in, is remembered.”

She paused, gathered up the hair from the back of her neck, let it fall.

She continued: “Scientists know that the sensory apparatus of single-celled organisms, however, are unfiltered. There is no distance between the sensation and the perception. There is no neural editing done by the brain, a brain which, of course, does not exist. This, you might agree,” she said, “is rather interesting, perhaps even sad, for the idea suggests that only the most rudimentary of organisms can perceive the universe as it really is.”

12

“But what does one see when one sees?” she asked on his twelfth visit to the windowless room. She handed him an amorphous fragment of what he would later discover to be garnet-red glass—for now, it was just an amorphous fragment of probably glass. “If you observe this object, any object, microscopically,” she continued, “you would see—or perhaps the better word is discover—that nothing is continuous, nothing is homogenous. Everything is granular. The sea, a cow, a sea cow, the amorphous fragment of glass in your hand, your hand—everything is made of collections of invisible particles, vibrating, spinning, mostly air.

“Love,” she said, “is no less tenuous.”

13

On his thirteenth visit the man said: “Someone—a nurse, with a beautiful voice that cracked at the ends of phrases—would read to me from time to time in my endless days in the room of mirrors. Once she read to me a story of a philosopher. German, I believe. I forget who exactly. A first name last name. The story, I will always remember, was about the philosopher’s socks.” The man laughed almost silently before continuing. “The philosopher recalls opening a drawer—he was just a child at the time—and discovering his socks, which his mother had rolled up in pairs and turned inside out in the usual manner. He described them as pockets. He would reach his hand into each one, as far as he could, finding great pleasure in the experience. Why would he do this? Why this pleasure? It was not for warmth or texture or feelings of possession or any sense of organizing principles or modes of production (I think the philosopher was a Marxist) or maternal love or sexual desire or whatever else we might come up with. It was simply for what he described as the ‘little present’ held within. And then, once he had established the existence of each of these little presents, held tightly in his fist, he would begin a new phase: the unfolding, the unveiling. There was a similar pleasure in this, but it also came with something he found disquieting: for each time he pulled from a rolled up sock its gift, he found that the pocket—which of course was formed of the substance of the present itself—would cease to be. And yet the philosopher remembers repeating this childhood experiment again and again.”

He sat in the room at the table before the woman, thinking about the story of the philosopher and the philosopher’s socks, but really thinking of the nurse and her voice and the room of mirrors.

He continued: “It took me a while, but I guess the story is about desire, about how the object one desires disappears at the moment of its attainment.”

After a moment of silence in the dark room, she spoke: “Desire is paradoxical, yes? The very object desire seeks to obtain, it also seeks to consume, and in the process it consumes itself. But one can imagine,” she continued, “or really imagine imagining, a perfect object, an object disentangled from all desire. The perfect object can be at once held and withheld.”

“I would like that,” he said, not at all sure what this perfect object might be, but understanding that this—this search—was why he was here.

14

She said on their fourteenth visit (but at this point who was counting?): “The story of the philosopher and his socks also exemplifies the unity of form and content, their consummation, their consubstantiation, their homoousianism.”

“You and your words,” he said, half laughing, half frowning.

15

She said: “Other examples of homeomorphism: A circle and a square. A hand and a soul. A woman’s hair spread out on your shoulder and the geometrical mapping of the shape of time. Silence and the sound of a bomb. A wounding and a healing. The loss of all love—and its commencement.”

16

And then finally: A warm wind. A red-orange sun. Equidistant plane trees. A man, a wounded soldier, back from a war. He stood before the two-story building of weathered bricks and arched windows, his long shadow stretching out to the east like a Giacometti statue. The little door. The awning flapping in a rising wind, the sound like someone lightly slapping skin. He waited to enter, on this day when he had everything to lose. The sun sank infinitesimally. Lines of clouds like whale ribs, each painted pink on one side, drifted across the darkening sky. And into mirrored rooms, into wombs of smoke, into darkness, we sometimes hasten our rebirths.

Afterword

I have, here and there, embellished, I have added words and phrases, occasionally changed the order of events, made educated guesses, filled in gaps, but the above describes, in more exactitude than the reader might believe, my first few months of meetings with the fortuneteller Gilberte. This is, to a large extent, how we spoke. The majority of the objects mentioned are genuine and are still sitting behind glass in her cabinet vitrine downstairs, or occasionally, I am sure, removed and presented to her clients. But memory, of course, is imprecise. I have done my best, but I’ve decided to call the above work fiction, if for no other reason than that the moniker has allowed me to include the pop-up book described in my seventh visit, a book that is, I admit, entirely fabricated.

I suppose one (other) aspect of my—let’s call it—“story” that is misleading is the timing of our love. I had fallen for her instantly. It was love at first sight (so to speak). Gilberte claims to have felt similarly. She told me that she knew, that she fell in love, the moment I quoted Calvino at our first meeting. I’ll take her at her word.

Gilberte was not born blind, but she lost her sight when she was so young that she now claims that she “no longer remembers what seeing ‘means.’ The idea of seeing, the whole concept of objects becoming upside down images in the eyes, turning into electrical signals, becoming reconstructed by our neurons into upside down upside down images in our brains that perhaps (or perhaps not) reflect, so to speak, the images of the objects so reflected, makes sense to me conceptually. But not practically. The images I imagine are completely divorced from those I ‘see’ with my other senses. They are entirely my own. I dream, I guess you could say, waking.”

As is often the case, her words elude me.

The bombing I’ve alluded to above occurred in the northern Parwan province of Afghanistan in the early spring of 2019. Three Marines and an Afghan contractor died in the attack: Cpl. Lex Boone, 22, of Salt Lake City, Utah; Sgt. Michael Parry, 23, of Sacramento, California; Staff Sgt. Lenny Cade, 41, of Chicago, Illinois; and Abdul Khan, 22, of Kabul. Two other trailing (obviously trailing) vehicles in the convoy survived, and I owe the nine accompanying service members with my life.

Gilberte and I are engaged to be married, as I write this. She is the answer to all of my prayers.



BIO

Erik Harper Klass has published stories and essays in a variety of journals, including New England Review, South Carolina Review, Yemassee (Cola Literary Review), Summerset Review, Slippery Elm, and Blood Orange Review, and he has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes. His novella Polish Poets in Beds with Girls is now available from Buttonhook Press. He writes in Los Angeles, CA.





Notes

“An hourglass could mean time passing . . . a place where hourglasses are made”: See Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Inc., 1974), 38.

‘oceanic feeling’: See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005), 47 and passim.

huge key attached to a wooden pear: See W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1998), 43.

 ‘whose minds are prone to mystery’: Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: Volume VI: Time Regained (1927), trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terrence Kilmartin (New York: The Modern Library, 2003), 283.

a tactile transcription of the prismatic specter: Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, Or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969) (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 469.

a shining metal cone, of the diameter of a die: Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940), trans. Alastair Reid, in Ficciones (New York: Grove Wiedenfeld, 1962), 33.

superimposing different criteria . . . teetering finally on the brink of anxiety: Michel Foucault, preface to The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966), trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), xviii.

the philosopher’s socks: For more on Walter Benjamin’s socks, see Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 3,ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1996), 374.







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